The Penobscot man

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THE PENOBSCOT MAN. With Frontis-
piece. i6mo, $1.25.

THE WOODPECKERS. With 5 illustra-
tions in color by L. A. Fuertes, and many
text illustrations. Square i2mo, $1.00.

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & COMPANY
Boston and New York.

THE PENOBSCOT MAN

\

RUNNING A LOG

THE

PENOBSCOT MAN

BY

FANNIE HARDY ECKSTORM

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY

1904

VICTORIA UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY

:}rary

COPYRIGHT 1904 BY FANNIE HARDY ECKSTORM
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

FEB iri9S6

VICTORIA UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY

TO

AND

That you and yours may know
From me and mine, how dear a debt
We owed you, and are owing yet
To you and yours, and still would owe."

I

For something about them, and the idea of them,
smote my American heart, and I have never forgotten
it, nor ever shall, as long as I live. In their flesh our
natural passions ran tumultuous; but in their spirit sat
hidden a true nobility, and often beneath its unexpected
shining their figures took on heroic stature. — Owen
WisTER, The Virginian,

CONTENTS

Introductory ix

I. Lugging Boat on Sowadne-

HUNK I

II. The Grim Tale of Larry Con-
nors 23

III. Hymns before Battle ... 49

IV. The Death OF Thoreau's Guide 63
V. The Gray Rock of Abol . . 103

VI. A Clump of Posies 147

VII. Working Nights 183

VIII. The Naughty Pride of Black

Sebat and Others . . . . 217

IX. Rescue 263

X. "Joyfully" 315

And when I went to bid him welcome home, he
told me that the history of your worship was already
printed in books, under the title of * Don Quixote de
la Mancha ; ' and he says it mentions me too by my
very name of Sancho Panza, and also the Lady Dul-
cinea del Toboso, and several other private matters
which passed between us two only ; insomuch that I
crossed myself out of pure amazement, to think how
the historian who wrote it should come to know them."
— The Adventures of Don Quixote de la Mancha,
Part II. book i. chap. 2.

INTRODUCTORY

The question is sometimes asked why a
state like Maine, so sparsely settled, poor,
weak in all external aids, can send forth
such throngs of masterful men, who, east
and west, step to the front to lead, direct,
and do. We who were brought up among
pine-trees and granite know the secret of
their success. It comes not wholly by tak-
ing thought: it is in the blood.

Here are stories of men, the kind we
have yet a-plenty, who die unknown and
unnoticed ; and every tale is a true one,
— not the chance report of strangers, the
gleanings of recent acquaintance, the after-
math of hearsay, the enlargements of a
fading tradition ; but the tales of men who
tended me in babyhood, who crooned to
me old slumber-songs, who brought me
gifts from the woods, who wrought me

INTRODUCTORY

little keepsakes, or amused my childish
hours, — stories which, having gathered
them from this one and that one who saw
the deed, I have bound into a garland to
lay upon their graves.

Such tales are numberless ; choice be-
comes invidious unless rigidly limited, and
therefore, since the old West Branch Drive
is no more, I have chosen solely among
its members, and have strung these tales,
like beads of remembrance, upon one
thread, — of which we who love it never
tire, — the River.

These are stories told with little art. In
the long run, the books that lie closest to
the facts have the advantage. It is lovely
to be beautiful, but it is essential to be true.
The events are actual occurrences ; the
names, real names ; the places any one may
see at any time. Yet each story is not
merely personal and solitary, but illustrates
typically some trait of the whole class.
Their virtues are not magnified, their faults

INTRODUCTORY

are not denied ; in black and white, for
good or evil, they stand here as they lived,
— as they themselves would prefer to stand
on record. So they acted, thus they felt,
these were their thoughts upon grave sub-
jects : and it may be that the Penobscot
man is a better, wiser, more serious man
than even his contemporaries have judged
him to be.

But one thing, from which we may
glimpse the secret of the Maine man's
success, cannot fail to impress whoever
reads these tales, and that is that he dies
so cheerfully. He is not concerned about
himself, nor about his future in another
world, so much as about his work here.
For Death, he does not fear it. Some-
times he courts it, sometimes he scoffs it,
sometimes he defies it ; but always, always
his work comes first. And however low it
may seem, however crude, however infe-
rior to that of the man of more culture,
finer perception, larger opportunity, he

INTRODUCTORY

likewise lives for an Ideal. For honor, for
friendship, for emulation, for sport, for
duty, for grim, stern, granite obstinacy, he
risks his life and wills his will into achieve-
ment, or dies for his failure.

His morals — we will not speak of them ;
his aspirations — he rarely talks of them ;
his religion — well. Heaven send that there
be many of us as sound in the righteous-
ness of charity as he ! But his real strength
is in his devotion to what he sets out to do.
As Stevenson says of our late lamented
Alan Breck : " Alan's morals were all tail-
first ; but he was ready to give his life for
them, such as they were." And this is
ever the litany of brave men the world
over : A clear conscience, a good cause,
O Lord, and, if it need me, the chance to
die for it.

I

LUGGING BOAT ON SOWAD-
NEHUNK

LUGGING BOAT ON SOWAD-
NEHUNK

This is a Penobscot story.

When the camp-fire is lighted, and the
smoke draws straight up without baffling,
and the branches overhead move only as
the rising current of heat fans them, then
if the talk veers round to stories of crack
watermen, and the guides, speaking more
to each other than to you, declare that it
was Big Sebattis Mitchell who first ran
the falls at Sowadnehunk, — though full
twenty years before, John Ross himself
had put a boat over and come out right
side up, — do not, while they are debating
whose is the credit of being first, let slip
your chance to hear a better tale; bid them
go on and tell you how Joe Attien, who
was Thoreau's guide, and his men who
followed after and who failed, were the
ones who made that day memorable.

4 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

And if your guides are Penobscot men,
they will tell it as Penobscot men should,
as if there were no merit in the deed be-
yond what any man might attain to, as if
the least a man should do was to throw
away his life on a reckless dare, and count
it well spent when so lavished. For so are
these men made, and as it was in those
days of the beginning, so is it yet even to
the present among us.

You will have heard, no doubt, of Se-
battis, he who from his bulk was called
by the whites Big Sebat, and from his
lazy shrewdness was nicknamed by his
tribesmen Ahwassus^ the Bear. Huge
and round he was, like the beast he was
named for, but strong and wise, and in his
dark, flat face and small, twinkling eyes
there were resources, ambitions, schemes.

Scores of you who read this will recollect
the place. In memory you will again pass
down the West Branch in your canoe, past
Ripogenus, past Ambajemackomas, past
the Horse Race, into the welcome dead-
water above Nesowadnehunk. There, wait-
ing in expectancy for that glorious revela-

LUGGING BOAT

5

tion of Katahdin which bursts upon you
above Abol, that marvelous picture of the
giant towering in majestic isolation, with
its white " slide " ascending like a ladder
to the heavens, you forgot yourself, did
not hear the tumult of falling waters, did
not see the smooth lip of the fall sucking
down, were unconscious that just before
you were the falls of Sowadnehunk. Then,
where the river veers sharply to the right,
you felt the guide spring on his paddle as
he made the carry by a margin, and you
realized what it would have been to drift
unguided over those falls.

So it has always been, — the sharp bend
of the river to the right, blue, smooth,
dazzling ; the carry at the left, bare, broad,
yellow-earthed. Crossing it forty rods, you
cut oflF the river again, and see above you
to the right the straight fall, both upper
and lower pitches almost as sheer as mill-
dams, and in front the angry boil of a
swift current among great and thickset
rocks. So it always stays in memory,—
at one end the blue river, smooth and
placid, and the yellow carry ; at the other,

6 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

the white hubbub of tossing rapids below
perpendicular falls.

One May day long ago, two boats' crews
came down to the carry and lugged across.
They had lugged three miles on Ripoge-
nus,and a half mile on Ambajemackomas,
besides the shorter carry past Chesuncook
Dam ; they had begun to know what lug-
ging a boat meant. The day was hot, —
no breeze, no shade ; it was getting along
toward noon, and they had turned out, as
usual, at three in the morning. They were
tired, — tired, faint, hot; weary with the
fatigue that stiffens the back and makes
the feet hang heavy ; weary, too, with the
monotony of weeks of dangerous toil with-
out a single day of rest, the weariness that
gets upon the brain and makes the eyes
go blurry ; weary because th^y were just
where they were, and that old river would
keep flowing on to Doomsday, always
drowning men and making them chafe
their shoulders lugging heavy boats. There
was not a man of them who could not
show upon his shoulder a great red spot
where the pole used in lugging boat, or

LUGGING BOAT 7

the end of an oar on which barrels of pork
or flour had been slung in carrying wan-
gan, had bruised and abraded it. And now
it was more lugging, and ahead were Abol
and Pockwockamus and Debsconeag and
Passangamet and Ambajejus and Fowler's
and — there are, indeed, how many of
them ! The over-weary always add to pre-
sent burdens that mountain of future toil.

So it was in silence that they took out
the oars and seats, the paddles and peavies
and pickaroons, drew the boats up and
drained them of all water, then, resting a
moment, straightened their backs, rubbed
the sore shoulders that so soon must take
up the burden again, and ran their fingers
through their damp hair. One or two
swore a little as relieving their minds, and
when they bent to lift the boat, one spoke
for all the others.

" By jinkey-boy ! " said he, creating a new
and fantastic oath, " but I do believe I 'd
rather be in hell to-day, with ninety devils
around me, than sole-carting on this carry."

That was the way they all felt. It is
mighty weary business to lug on carries.

8 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

For a driving-boat is a heavy lady to carry.
The great Maynards, wet, weigh eight to
nine hundred pounds, and they put on
twelve men, a double crew, to carry one.
The old two-streakers (that is, boats with
two boards to a side where the big May-
nards had three) were not nearly so heavy,
and on short carries like Sowadnehunk
were lugged by their own crews, whether
of four men or six; but diminishing the
crew left each man with as great a burden.
A short man at the bow, another at the
stern, with the taller ones amidships under
the curve of the gunwale if they were lug-
ging without poles, or by twos fore, aft,
and amidships for six men lugging with
poles, was the usual way they carried their
boats ; and it was " Steady, boys, steady ;
now hoist her !" — "Easy, now, easy; hold
hard I for going downhill she overrode
John and Jim at the bow, and going up
a rise Jack and Joe at the stern felt her
crushing their shoulders, and when the
ground was uneven with rocks and cradle-
knolls, and she reeled and sagged, then
the men at the sides caught the whole

LUGGING BOAT 9

weight on one or the other of them. No-
thing on the drive speaks so eloquently of
hard work as the purple, sweat-stained cross
on the backs of the men's red shirts, where
the suspenders have made their mark; they
get this in lugging boat on carries.

But they bent their backs to it, wrig-
gled the boat up and forward to her place,
each crew its own boat, and staggered on,
feet bracing out, and spike-soled shoes
ploughing the dirt and scratching on the
rocks. They looked like huge hundred-
leggers, Brobdingnagian insects, that were
crawling over that yellow carry with all
their legs clawing uncertainly and bracing
for a foothold. The head boat crowded
Bill Halpin upon a rock so hard that he fell
and barked his shins on the granite ; that
dropped the weight suddenly upon Jerry
Durgan's shoulder, so that a good two
inches of skin was rasped off clean where
it had been blistered before ; little Tomah
Soc stumbled in a hole, and not letting go
his grip, threw up the other gunwale so that
it half broke his partner's jaw. Those boats
took all the mean revenges wherewith a

10 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

driving-boat on land settles scores for the
rough treatment it receives in the water.

They were lugging that May morning
only because no boat could run those falls
with any reasonable expectation of coming
out right side up. For up to that time
they had chiefly used the Wallace boat,
built low and straight in the gunwale, rak-
ing only moderately at the bow and low in
the side. It is related that when the great
high-bowed Maynard batteaus were first
put on the river, short old Jack Mann,
who was pensioned in his latter days by
P. L. D.,' looked with high disfavor on
the big, handsome craft, and then, rushing
into the boat-shop, demanded an axe, an
auger, and a handsaw.

" What 's that for ? " asked the foreman,
suspecting that it was but one of Jack's
devices for unburdening his mind in some
memorable saying.

' The Penobscot Log-Driving Association, known as
P. L. D. to distinguish it from P. L. A., the Penobscot
Lumbering Association. It is always called either
**P. L. D/"* or <<The Company." It owns all dams,
booms, etc., and annually sells the drive at auction to
the bidder contracting to take the logs down at the low-
est rate per thousand.

LUGGING BOAT

" Want 'em to cut armholes in that
blasted boat," growled Jack, insinuating
that the bows were above the head of a
short man like himself.

But the old boat, — you may yet some-
times see the bones of one of them bleach-
ing about the shores of inland ponds, or
lying sun-cracked in the back yards of
country farms, — stable and serviceable as
she was, was no match for this handsome
lady of to-day. They run the Arches of
Ripogenus now with all their boats, and
have done it for years ; but at the time
when Sebattis came down to Sowadnehunk,
such water no man ever dreamed of run-
ning. It is likely enough that Sebattis,
just back from a sixteen years' residence
at Quoddy, did not know that it had ever
been run successfully.

Be that as it may, when Sebattis and
his bowman came down, the last of three
boats, and held their batteau at the taking-
out place a moment before they dragged
her out and stripped her ready to lug,
what Sebattis, as he sat in the stern with
his paddle across his knees, said in In-

12 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

dian to his bowman was simply revolu-
tionary.

" Huh ? " grunted his dark-faced part-
ner, turning in great surprise ; " you
t'ought you wanted run it dose e'er falls ?
Blenty rabbidge water dose e'er falls ! "

The bowman had stated the case con-
servatively. That carry was there merely
because men were not expected to run
those falls and come out alive.

But the bowman's objection was not
meant as a refusal : he knew Sebattis, that
he was a good waterman, few better. A
big, slow man, of tremendous momentum
when once in motion, it was likely enough
that all the years of his exile at Quoddy he
had been planning just how he could run
those falls, and if he spoke now, it was
because this was the hour striking. In his
own mind he had already performed the
feat, and was receiving the congratulations
of the crowd. It was no small advantage
that he knew an audience of two boats'
crews was waiting at the lower carry-end to
testify, however grudgingly, to the authen-
ticity of what he claimed to have done.

LUGGING BOAT

The bowman had faith in Sebattis ; as
he listened to the smooth stream of soft-
cadenced Indian that cast silvery bonds
about his reluctance and left him helpless
to refuse (Sebattis being both an orator
in a public and a powerful pleader in a
private cause), the bowman caught the
rhythm of the deed. It was all so easy to
take their boat out into midstream, where
the current favored them a little, to shoot
her bow far out over the fall, and, as the
crews ashore gaped in horrified amazement,
to make her leap clear, as a horse leaps
a hurdle. And then to fight their way
through the smother of the whirlpool be-
low, man against water, but such men as
not every boat can put in bow and stern,
such strong arms as do not hold every
paddle, such great heads for management,
such skill in water-craft as few attain.

This was the oration, with its Indian ap-
peal to personal glory. It was, as Sebattis
said, " Beeg t'ing^' and he fired his bowman
with the desire for glory. The Penob-
scot man, white man or Indian, dies with
astonishing alacrity when he sees anything

14 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

worth dying for. And the name of "crack
waterman " is a shining mark to strive for.

Thus at the upper end of the carry Se-
battis and his bowman talked over at their
leisure the chances of dying within five
minutes. At the other end the two boats'
crews lay among the blueberry bushes in
the shade of shivering birch saplings and
waited for Sebattis. It did not worry them
that he was long in coming ; they knew the
leisurely Indian ways, and how unwilling,
though he weighed hard upon two hundred
and sixty, and had strength to correspond,
was Big Sebattis to lug an extra pound.
They pictured him draining his boat and
sopping out with a swab of bracken the
last dispensable ounce of water, then tilting
her to the sun for a few minutes to steam
out a trifle more before he whooped to
them to come across and help him. It did
not worry them to wait, — it was all one
in the end : there would be carries to lug
on long after they were dead and gone.

So, looking at the logs ricked up along
the shores and cross-piled on the ledges,
looking at the others drifting past, wallow-

LUGGING BOAT

ing and thrashing in the wicked boil below
the falls, they lounged and chaffed one an-
other. Jerry Durgan was surreptitiously
laying cool birch leaves on his abraded
shoulder, and Bill Halpin was attentively,
though silently, regarding his shins : there
had been none too much stocking between
him and that " big gray." The Indians,
stretched out on their backs, gazed at the
sky; nothing fretted them much. On* one
side, an Indian and an Irishman were hav-
ing a passage at wit ; on the other, two or
three were arguing the ins and outs of a
big fight up at 'Suncook the winter before,
and a Province man was colloguing with a
Yankee on points of scriptural interpreta-
tion. It was such talk as might be over-
heard almost any time on the drive when
men are resting at their ease.

" It was French Joe that nailed Billy ;
Billy he told me so," came from the group
under the birches.

From among the Indians out in the
sunlight arose a persuasive Irish voice.

"Why is it, Tomah, that when your
folks are good Catholics, and our folks

i6 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

are good Catholics, you don't ever name
your children Patrick and Bridget?"

And the reply came quick : " 'Cause we
hate it Irish so bad, you know ! "

Off at the right they were wrangling
about the construction of the Ark.

" And I 'd just like to have seen that
bo't when they got her done," said the
Yankee ; "just one door an' one win-
der, an' vent'lated like Harvey Doane's
scho'l'ouse. They caught him nailin' of
the winders down. ^ How be ye goin' to
vent'late? ' says they. ^ Oh,' says he, afresh
air 's powerful circulatin' stuff ; I callate
they '11 carry the old air out in their pock-
ets, an' bring in enough fresh air in their
caps to keep 'em goin' ; ' an' that was all
they ever did get 's long 's he was school
agent. My scissors ! three stories an' all
full of live-stock, an' only one winder, an'
that all battened down ! Tell you what !
I 'd 'a' hated to be Mr. Noah's fambly an'
had to stay in that ole Ark ten months
an' a half before they took the cover off!
Fact ! I read it all up onct ! "

Said another: "I don't seem to' member

LUGGING BOAT 17

how she was built, 'ceptin' the way they
run her seams. She must have ben a jim-
dickey house with the pitch all on the in-
side 's well as on the outside o' her. Seems
to me a bo't ain't bettered none by a daub
o' pitch where the' ain't none needed."

" 'T ain't the Ark as bothers me some/'
put in the Province man ; " I reckon that
flood business is pretty nigh straight, but
I could n't never cipher out about that
Tower of Babel thing. Man ask for a hod
o' mortar, an' like enough they 'd send
him up a barrel of gaspereau ; that 's " —

The religious discussion broke off ab-
ruptly.

" Holy Hell ! — Look a-comin' ! "
gasped the Yankee.

Man ! but that was a sight to see !
They got up and devoured it with their
eyes.

On the verge of the fall hovered the
batteau about to leap. Big Sebat and his
bowman crouched to help her, like a rider
lifting his horse to a leap. And their eyes
were set with fierce excitement, their hands
cleaved to their paddle handles, they felt

1 8 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

the thrill that ran through the boat as they
shot her clear, and, flying out beyond the
curtain of the fall, they landed her in the
yeasty rapids below.

Both on their feet then ! And how they
bent their paddles and whipped them from
side to side, as it was " In ! " — " Out ! "
— " Right ! — " Left ! " to avoid the logs
caught on the ledges and the great rocks
that lay beneath the boils and snapped at
them with their ugly fangs as they went
flying past. The spray was on them ; the
surges crested over their gunwales ; they
sheered from the rock, but cut the wave
that covered it and carried it inboard. And
always it was " Right ! " — " Left ! " —
" In ! — " Out ! " as the greater danger
drove them to seek the less.

But finally they ran her out through the
tail of the boil, and fetched her ashore in a
cove below the carry-end, out of sight of the
men. She was full of water, barely afloat.

Would Sebattis own to the boys who
were hurrying down through the bushes
that he had escaped with his life only by
the greatest luck ? Not Sebattis !

LUGGING BOAT

" Now you bale her out paddles/' said he
to his bowman, and they swept her with
their paddles as one might with a broom.

" Now you drain her out," commanded
Sebattis, when they could lift the remain-
ing weight, and they raised the bow and
let the water run out over the slanting
stern, all but a few pailfuls. " Better you
let dat stay,*' said the shrewd Sebattis.

It was quick work, but when the crew
broke through the bushes, there stood Se-
battis and his bowman leaning on their
paddles like bronze caryatids, one on either
side of the boat. They might have been
standing thus since the days of the Pha-
raohs, they were so at ease.

" Well, boys, how did you make it ?
queried the first to arrive on the spot.

Sebattis smiled his simple, vacuous smile.
" Oh, ver' good ; she took in liir water
mebbe."

" By gee, that ain't much water ! Did
she strike anything? "

Sebattis helped to turn her over. She
had not a scratch upon her.

Then the men all looked again at the

20 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

boat that had been over Sowadnehunk,
and they all trooped back to the carry-
end without saying much, two full batteau
crews and Sebattis and his bowman. They
did not talk. No man would have gained
anything new by exchanging thoughts with
his neighbor.

And when they came to the two boats
drying in the sun, they looked one another
in the eyes again. It was a foregone con-
clusion. Without a word they put their
galled shoulders under the gunwales, lifted
the heavy batteaus to their places, and
started back across that carry forty rods
to the end they had just come from.

What for ? It was that in his own esteem
a Penobscot man will not stand second to
any other man. They would not have it
said that Sebattis Mitchell was the only
man of them who had tried to run Sowad-
nehunk Falls.

So they put in again, six men to a boat,
full crews, and in the stern of one stood
Joe Attien, who was Thoreau's guide, and
in the bow Steve Stanislaus, his cousin.
That sets the date, — that it was back in

LUGGING BOAT

1870, — for it became the occasion for
another and a sadder tale. If only Steve
Stanislaus had held that place for the rest
of the drive, it is little likely that we
should have to tell the story of the death
of Thoreau's guide.

And they pushed out with their two
boats and ran the falls.

But the luck that bore Sebattis safely
through was not theirs. Both boats were
swamped, battered on the rocks into kin-
dling wood. Twelve men were thrown
into the water, and pounded and swashed
about among logs and rocks. Some by
swimming, some by the aid of Sebattis
and his boat, eleven of them got ashore,
" a little damp," as no doubt the least ex-
aggerative of them were willing to admit.
The unlucky twelfth man they picked up
later, quite undeniably drowned. And the
boats were irretrievably smashed. Indeed,
that was the part of the tale that rankled
with Sebattis when he used to tell it.

" Berry much she blame it us " (that is,
himself) " that time John Loss." (Always
to the Indian mind John Ross, the head

22 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

contractor of the drive, was the power that
commanded wind, logs, and weather.) "She
don' care so much 'cause drowned it man,
'cause she can get blenty of it men ; but
dose e'er boats she talk 'bout berry hard."

That is how they look at such little deeds
themselves. The man who led off gets the
credit and the blame; he is the only one
remembered. But to an outsider, what
wins more than passing admiration is not
the one man who succeeded, but the many
who followed after and failed, who could
not let well enough alone when there was
a possible better to be achieved, but, on
the welcome end of the carry, the end where
all their troubles of galls and bruises and
heavy burdens in the heat are over, pick up
their boats without a word, not one man
of them falling out, and lug them back a
weary forty rods to fight another round
with Death sooner than own themselves
outdone.

II

THE GRIM TALE OF LARRY
CONNORS

THE GRIM TALE OF LARRY
CONNORS

It is hardly conceivable that at noon of a
hot summer day, in clear sight and clear
sunshine, not a cloud nor a shadow to
suggest a mystery, a keen, shrewd, practical
business man, one of the head contractors
of -a big concern like the West Branch
Drive, should think he saw a ghost, more
especially when the apparition was topped
by a flaming hat of scarlet felt and accom-
panied by two manifestly flesh-and-blood
woodsmen not unknown to him. But so
it fell out at the Dry Way of Ripogenus.
And "Jim'* owned up to his scare.

"By gum," said he, when he met me
afterwards, " but you had me that time."
And there would have been no sense in
denying it, for he had given a snort like a
startled buck, and even at ten rods away
his attitude of surprise and consternation

26 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

betrayed him. " Seeing you come' up out
of that hole with that red hat on, I thought
for sure you must be the ghost of Larry
Connors. I 'd passed there not half a min-
ute before, and not seen nothin', the bank 's
so steep there. Then I looked back over
my shoulder and up pops that red hat ;
thought for a secont that the everlastin'
ha'nts had got me sure ! "

Years afterward I was talking with a
riverman of the old school. "And have
you been up there! And do you know
the Big Heater, and the Little Heater,
and the Big Arches, and the Little Arches !
And say, now, do you know about Larry
Connors ! Well, I want t' know, you do
know all about Larry Connors ! Smartest
man ever was on the West Branch Drive ! "
And then the rosy sunset of his recollec-
tion burned away to ashen thoughts. " But
they never found nothin' of him," he said
slowly and sombrely.

" Lewey Ketchum — said L
" Yes — Lewey Ketchum — that 's so
— down to the Big Eddy," said he, and
stopped. It was plain he knew the story.

LARRY CONNORS 27

But this was long since, by virtue of
being taken in broad daylight for the ghost
of Larry Connors, I came into possession
of the facts about his death. One and an-
other told it, each one adding something ;
bit by bit I patched the whole together
till I made the story out.

"Yes, old Jim he got his hoops started
all right enough," said one of the men.
" He would n't ha' owned up to it, if there
had been any other way out. You see,
Larry was killed right about that very
spot. And the drive had all gone along,
and Jim he 'd just come down, — had n't
even heerd of your bein' here, — an' most
like 's he was just sa'nterin' along the
drivin'-path, not expectin' to see no one,
he got to thinkin' about Larry. Then he
seen your red hat, and that fixed him.
You see, Larry alwers wore somethin' red
on his head ; that red topknot was his
trade-mark ; did n't seem to make much
differ what it was, a cap, or a handkerchief,
or a red band round his hat, or the end
of an old comforter pulled on, — just as
far as you could see him, there would be

28 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

Larry's red comb sticking up, and him
just whelting into the logs and swearin' to
beat seven of a kind. There 's no mistak-
in' but Larry was a turrible able man.''

But what was there about Larry Con-
nors that, so many years after his death,
could conjure up his ghost in broad day,
bright sunlight, open spaces, to affright a
sober, shrewd, hard-headed business man ?
Not, certainly, that he wore a fantastic
headdress and died in the Dry Way of
Ripogenus. Many are the men that have
gone down in the morning to work on the
logs in that gorge, men of blood and bone,
who at evening, as thin, impalpable ghosts,
have stolen up from Ripogenus to what-
ever land of shades and twilight duskiness
— growing, let us hope, to brighter dawn-
ing — is allotted to men, not righteous,
nor moral, nor admirable altogether, but
yet dying ungrudgingly for their work.
Throngs of such have traveled up the
gorge of Ripogenus since Larry Connors
died there thirty years ago, and yet of
them all you will hear no name so often
repeated, no story so many times rehearsed.

LARRY CONNORS

as the grim tale of Larry's going. Some-
how the men do not seem to forget Larry-
Connors. He stands for somewhat more
than fantastic headgear and spectacular
annihilation.

Larry Connors was an Exchange Street
Irishman, and the best of his education he
acquired upon the logs at City Point. By
the time he was graduated from the super-
vision of the truant officer, he was capable
of doing anything on logs. He was utterly
fearless, thoroughly efficient, a lighting
Irishman of the old bulldog type, close-
haired, crop-eared, bullet-headed, ready
always to show his teeth — less only the
front one knocked out in a fight — with
reason or without. Yet the men liked him.
My father, for whom he worked all one
winter in the woods, always had a good
word for Larry, that he was a hard worker,
a quiet man in camp, and — which is per-
haps the most remarkable thing ever said
of Larry Connors — that he never heard
him swear.

This commendation must stand unique.
For I have heard it said by one of his

30 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

mates that Larry was " the wickedest man
that ever went on the West Branch Drive/'

" And you had n't better not believe/'
my informant went on, sowing his negatives
with so lavish a hand that it was doubtful
whether the crop would grow up odd or
even, " you had n't better not believe that
this West Branch Drive ain't not no holy
Sunday-school ! " Being bred up to the
Maine woods and its speech, I understood
him to imply that Larry was notoriously
profane ; that was certainly his meaning.
Yet had Larry killed a man, or been of vi-
cious and irreclaimable temper, or of bestial
cruelty, or implacable in revenge, — even
then, though he might have been avoided
as a " bad " man, he would hardly have
been condemned as a "wicked" one. No,
the wicked man is the profane swearer,
the unprovoked blasphemer.

How does it happen, inquires the stran-
ger, that in a country where neither dog,
horse, ox, nor log will move till it is prod-
ded with an oath, where profanity is general
rather than the exception, and there is a
variety and ingenuity and artistic finish

LARRY CONNORS 31

about even the commonplace cursing that
marks it as the work of no unpracticed
tongue, how does it happen that this com-
monest vice of all is selected as the most
censurable ?

In its common forms it is neither cen-
sured nor censurable especially, nor is it a
vice ; it is a vulgarity. There is no harm
intended by the pleasant maledictions of
every-day life, the oath of emphasis, the
oath of affection, the oath of good-fellow-
ship just to make you feel at home, the
picturesque and kindly cursing of the fel-
low of scanty vocabulary. But now and
then arises a man of different temper, who
blasphemes violently, who studies it as an
art, who, not using it as a neighborly by-
path of speech, so lavishes his energies on
purely rhetorical anathemas that he chills
the blood of even these seasoned woods-
men and rivermen. Such men, they say,
will sometimes swear five minutes at a time
without stopping, and swear "most hor-
rid ; " and these they say are " wicked men,*'
because, as they know from dread experi-
ence, no man can thus defy the Almighty

32 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

and come out scathless. Hence the over-
powering impiousness of those like Larry
Connors, upon whom the judgment was
swift and sure. This is why the man is
still remembered.

Yet if you dare assume that it was not a
judgment, no man agrees with you. There
were enough that day who heard him say
that he would break that jam or go to
hell doing it. How many of those who
have spoken to me have spoken as eye-
witnesses ! " I was right there ! — "I
should have been with him on the logs,
but I had just gone ashore for my axe.'*
— "I saw the whole thing." — "I did n't
see it, but I could hear it all, and the man
next to me he said, ' There 's some poor
fellow gone ; guess it must be Larry.' " —
" Yes, he did say just them very words,
for I was right by and heard it." One after
another, though it is thirty years since and
the ranks are thinning, has rehearsed the
scene and his words. For they all know
how Larry Connors died at the Dry Way
of Ripogenus.

In those days the Dry Way was not a

LARRY CONNORS 33

dry way, but a waterway. They have tamed
the River since then, and this is one of the
places where it wears the curb. Rough as
it is to-day, the River is a chained beast
beside what it once was. To-day, where
channels divide, wing-dams throw all the
water into one thoroughfare ; to-day there
is a great dam at the head of Ripogenus
Gorge, with gates to control the water and
the sluicing ; to-day, by night and by light,
men stand on every commanding point,
waving a firebrand if it is dark, their hands
by day (unless already the telephone has
superseded these), watching and signaling
if the logs catch on ; in two minutes word
goes up from the Little Arches three miles
below, and the sluicing stops till the jam is
cleared. Nolonger do the great sticks come
leaping up on the backs of those already
stranded, uncounted and uncontrollable.
And to-day, if a jam does form, there is
a little shed by the dam where dynamite
is kept ; enough of that will remove the
stubbornest obstruction. But the older
men will tell you how in their youth, that
is, in Larry Connors' day, they were let

THE PENOBSCOT MAN

down by ropes from the cliffs at the Big
Heater, to hang like dangling spiders from
a thread when the jam broke under them ;
how they watched and warred on the
Arches ; how they held the perilous pass
by the Little Heater against leaping tim-
bers; how they fought for life with the wild
logs below the Dry Way. In Larry Con-
nors' day it was " We who are about to
die, salute you/' They died, — they never
surrendered, — that is why the River has
been conquered.

There is three miles of this turbulent
water, the roughest that the will of man
ever brought to heel and made to carry his
freights for him. Those who have seen it
in the drought of August, when the lakes
are emptied and the current is weak and
lagging, have no conception of the gran-
deur of the spring torrent. " Three miles
of Niagara," a lumberman once called it,
and the phrase well describes this canyon,
ripped out of the solid rock, with sheer
and often inaccessible walls, and the rock-
ribbed, boulder-studded river-bed, falling
more than seventy feet to the mile, down

LARRY CONNORS 35

which rushes a boiling, seething, smoking
flood of water, all a-lather in its haste.

The worst place upon it is just at the
head of the gorge as the waters leave the
lake. Here an island divides the channel,
and a great dam is stretched across both
branches of the river. The part of the dam
on the north is pierced for sluice and gate
ways ; the southern portion is a side-dam,
without gates, to cut the water off entirely
from the lesser channel. Down one side
of the island race the white horses of the
falls, tossing their manes, thundering,
smashing, flying in a smother of foam as
they press through the Gorge of the Per-
petual Rainbow. Down the other side lies
the Dry Way, and here the former river-
bed is scraped to the bone, bare of all water
but a silvery trickle, with beetling sides of
bare and shining rock. What a contrast be-
tween this and the waterway the other side
of the island ! There they never attempt
to clear a jam ; they let it catch and grow,
and soon the pressure of the water behind
it tears all away, snapping the largest logs
like willow wands, tossing them thirty feet

36 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

in air. " We never put a man on there to
clear a jam/' Joe Francis told me, and he
was boss of the whole drive that year; "we
let it form and pile up, and the water tears
it all away." Nor would he even let us go
to look at it until they were done sluicing,
on account of the danger from leaping logs.

Once, before the dam was built, the Dry
Way was like that, too. In Larry Con-
nors' day, it was not dry but a waterway
like the other. It was just here by the foot
of the island, where the southern shore
sweeps round like an amphitheatre, that a
jam had formed that day when Larry made
his last bid against death, for the glory of
being looked at.

It was not a big jam, only a hundred
and fifty or two hundred thousand feet of
pine ; but it was a bad one, held by a sin-
gle key-log. The boss of that crew had
been on it and sounded it. He had come
ashore with his hand on his chin. He was
a Spencer, and if any one knows logs and
water it ought to be a Spencer, — Veazie,
or Oldtown, or Argyle, they are all river-
men. Thirteen springs this one worked on

LARRY CONNORS 37

the West Branch Drive, and it rested with
him to say what was to be done now.

" What d' ye think of it, Steve ? " asked
one of the men.

" Think ? — 1 think it is a devil of a
jam for a Httle one," said he ; "I 'm still
thinking."

An old riverman had undertaken to tell
the tale, and he went on : —

" Course the fellows was all hangin'
round waiting to be ordered on. They
had their peavies with them, and was just
a-holdin' for the word how to take it.

" ^ It 's all right for a jam,' said Steve ;
^ when she hauls, she '11 go clearn to thun-
der, and it won't cost the Comp'ny a red for
pickin' up the pieces ; whole thing hangs
on one key-log, 's neat and pretty as a
basket of chips, and jest about as safe as
a berrill of gunpowder on the Fourth o'
July ; when she goes, she '11 go tearin'.
Sorry to disapp'int ye, boys, but I guess
I won't drownd any of ye to-day. We '11
dog-warp this off. Get the tackle and
take a hitch around that key-log, and we '11
put on men enough to send her flukin'.'

38 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

" Well, boss is boss, and boss is s'posed
to have things his own way ; but there was
boys there that would n't listen to this.
Safe ways o' doin' things wasn't what they
was cryin' for. Out steps Larry, and he did
look the able man for sure, calked shoes
and a blue shirt, his trousers cut off at the
knees and more rags 'n patches. And he
had a red handkerchief tied round his head
kind o' cocky, so the tails of it flew out.
He just swung his peavey up on his shoul-
der and planted hisself, with one hand held
out — well, they don't make abler men to
look at.

" ^ Look a-here, Steve,' says he, ^ I 'm
beggin' the chance.'

" ^ I know you are a crack man, Larry,'
says Steve ; ' but I 'd ruther drownd a
poorer one; mine's the best way, Larry,'
says he, kind o' coaxin' him.

" Then Larry turns round to the boys,
and sorter smiled at 'em. It was the big
dare he was givin' 'em, but he did n't speak
it loud, only smilin' like 's if he thought
they was an easy crew to beat out.

"It's my job, boys,' says he, sort o' sat-

LARRY CONNORS

isfied ; M 'U go a step beyond any man in
this crew.'

"And he had n't not got the words out'n
his mouth when out steps Charley RoUins
of Veazie, and RolHns says, says he : ' The
man that goes a step ahead of me he goes
to hell ! ' says he.

" Well, that fixed it. Larry sprung his
knees a little 's if to limber 'em, an' he
says, ^ That's all right, Charley; that's a
bully bluff, but I '11 raise you.'

" There would n't have been any holding
them back after that. Them two was in the
same bo't together, and they 'd been run-
nin' races all the spring to see which could
get into the most bad places. No matter
who else had volunteered, after that it was
betwixt them two to cut that key-log.

" So the rest of the crew took their pea-
vies, and they got their axes, and they all
went out on the logs. I s'pose it was long
'bout here that Larry went back to camp
and got a luncheon, because it was Rol-
lins's turn to go first. Anyway, Larry goes
up to camp, and he sets down under the
bushes and commences to fire bits of waste

40 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

biscuit at a squirrel that was around fiUin'
up his wangan on sody bread, an' says he,
^ Say, cooky,' — Furbish was cook that
year, he told us all what Larry said arter-
wards, — ^ say, cooky, gimme a hatful o'
biscuit an' a hunk o' boss ; I 'm hungrier
'n an owl on Friday. Just ben down to
the foot o' the Island, an' they 've got the '
— well, he said they had the — the —
donno 's I can justly remember what it
was that he did say." There was a bland
ingenuousness about the evasion which I
admired as coming from one whose pho-
nographic memory was never known to
blur a record. " But he told cook, says
he, * I 'm goin' to break that jam, if I go
to hell doing it.' Them 's just his words ;
mebbe he said more arterwards, I don't
know, Larry was quite a hand to talk, he
did n't know no better ; but he did say
that he would break that jam or go to
hell doing it, all the boys testified to that.

" Well, it was Rollins's turn to go on
first, as I was sayin'. You see, in a bad
place they spell men ; that 's the custom.
It don't do to have a man git all tuckered

LARRY CONNORS 41

out with hard work and then have to run
for his hfe when he hain't nother lungs
nor hmbs to help him ; for the minit she
cracks he 's got to jump and run like thun-
der. So when the boss thinks that the first
one 's done all that 's good for him, he calls
him back and sends out another man. O'
course the last one has the wust chance.
Now Larry made the dare, and he was the
one that raised it, and it was his right to
get in the last clip at that log — that's
what he was biddin' for. And that 's why
Rollins went on first.

" OPn an' of 'n in a bad place they
would have ropes around the men and
pull them out, right up above the danger.
But this time the boys knew they 'd got
to leg it on their own hook ; and let me
tell you, when you 've got five hundred
thousand — feet that is, board feet — of
big pine pitch-poling after you, why you
can run all right if there 's any run in you.
Just heave away your axe and strike a bee-
line for the shore, and you won't get there
then none too soon for your peace o' mind.
Breakin' jams is some uncerting work.

42 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

"Well, 'twas Rollins's turn to go first,
's I was sayin'. He looked at that key-log
and bit his axe in full clip. Did ye ever
hear an axe take into wood that 's under
bustin' strain ? Never did ? Well, you lis-
ten some day, 'f ever you get the chance.

" And Rollins begun his scarf on the
under side of the log. That was a right
enough thing to do ; that was good play ;
more'n that, it was fair by Larry. After
Rollins got his scarf in all in good shape,
Spencer calls him back and sends out
Larry.

" Out runs Larry, skippin' and swear-
in', his kerchief tails flying, and all the
boys lookin' on to see him go. A turri-
ble reckless fellow was that Larry. And
either he did n't stop to think, or else he
did n't care, for the fust thing that he done
was to put in his sgarf on the upper side
of that log.

"What's the trouble with that? All
the trouble in the worlds I tell ye, seein'
his life might hang on a quarter of a sec-
ont! If he 'd 'a' kep' on in Rollins's
scarf, that log when it cracked would 'ave

LARRY CONNORS

cr-r-r-2i-B,-acked ! He'd ha' heard it split-
tin' long enough to ha' got a start before
the jam did. Cuttin' in on the top-side
weakened it too sudden. When the log
broke, it just i?ust.

" Well, then she hauled !

"And by Judas' hemp, an' two select-
men, a yoke of oxen, an' an old snag
throwed in, but p'raps that wa'n't no sight
to see ! And to hear, too ! Every lad in
sight raised a yell, and those on shore
danced and flung up their hats. And
those on the logs they cut and run like
the rd'cess bell had rung and they did n't
want to be late in. ^nd the logs they
started, jumping and squealing and thrash-
ing and grinding, like seventeen sawmills
runnin' full-blast of a Sunday. You never
hearn anything in your life like a big jam
of logs let loose. You ain't no idee of the
noise and hubbub one of them will make
when she hauls.

" The men got a pretty good start, but
for all o' that they was tumbled in amongst
the logs and used pretty rough. Two or
three of 'em had to lay down in the cracks

44 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

of the laidge and let the logs roll over 'em;
but they lAanaged to cling a-holt of the
alders, and they all got out 'ceptin' Larry.

"He was quicker 'n- Mr^^ cats, Larry
was, but he wa'n't quite up to the gait
them logs set him, just flyin' through the
air and up-endin' every which way. And
o' course he had the wust chance ; that 's
what he bid for. They tell the story dif-
ferent about Larry. Some says that he
made a laidge all right, and a big log
squirled and caught him, and they see a
red streak just like you 'd hit a mosquito
there. But what / see was that he was on
the jam a-runnin', and a big pine lept an'
struck him in the back. Head and heels
met in the air as it flung him clean. And
he fell amongst the logs and they rid over
him. But we never see no more of Larry
Connors. He said he was goin' to break
that jam, if he went to hell for it, and he
broke it all right enough."

So that was all there was to it. A brave
man — a great dare — a wager won, or lost,
as you will — and then all is snuffed out
as irrecoverably as the flame of a candle.

LARRY CONNORS 45

They looked for the body far and near,
but there was nothing to be found. Babb
was the head contractor of the drive that
year, and he took charge of the dead man's
kit. I have been told that when it was
overhauled before being packed to send
out to his friends, the men stood round in
silence, not so much curious as respectful,
wondering how that little bag of worthless
duffle turned out on a blanket to be sorted
by the head man kneeling beside it could
be all that was left of so brave a man as
Larry ; silent for the most part, or when
they did speak, speaking briefly and to the
point; for they could not forget that say-
ing of old Jack Mann's, that " Larry was
60 fond of stealing that when he could n't
get anything else he would steal the stock-
ing off from one foot and put it on the
other."

" Says one : ^ If you find a knife with a
boot-leg sheath, it 's mine ; Larry borried
it mebbe.'

" And another says : VI 'm short two
pair o' socks, blue yarn footed down with
gray, lookin' like that pair there.'

46 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

" And another and another steps up
with his claim.

" So they laid out all the things that
was called for. And there was a cardigan
marked ^ Newell/ and a vest with a hand-
kerchief in it marked ' Myra Spencer/
and other things that did n't seem rightly
to belong to his folks. And all the boys
looked on it as a judgment on swearing.

" You see there is such things as judg-
ments. Never knew a man to say that
God Almighty could n't drownd him but
he went and got drownded within the hour.
There was one up to Telos Cut was rode
under by two logs just as soon as he said
it. And there was one down to the Gray
Rock of Abol, slipped off 'n a perfectly safe
place and went downstream like lead, and
him a good swimmer. And there was John
Goddard's barn that he said he built so
firm that the Almighty could n't fetch wind
enough to shake it. He 'd had two blow
down before that, and he built that one to
stand. And then there came a harricane
that just sifted that barn into toothpicks,
and eight good driving-bo'ts in it, but they

LARRY CONNORS

never found hide nor hair of 'em. And
then there was Larry. Them 's judgments.

" Did n't no one ever find no sign of
him ? M-m-m-no ! That is, we did n't.
He just went out like the smoke of a
dand'Ii'n blossom ; did n't leave no trace.
But next spring, when Lewey Ketchum an'
Joe Dimon was up on their spring hunt
arter bears, down by the Big Eddy, — that's
good three mile below the Dry Way ; you
know, you ben there times enough, — in
back mebbe a quarter of a mile from the
eddy, in open secont growth, I heerd tell
that they found a huming skull, and it
had the marks of bears' teeth on it.

" They was skinnin' a bear at the time
that they 'd just taken out o' their trap, and
Joe he sa'ntered off in the woods while
Lewey finished oflT the skin. And bime-by
he sung out, ' Lewey — Lewey, there 's the
funniest skull here you ever see ; a,wful
round it is.'

" ^ Lucivee,' I guess,' says Lewey,
keepin' right on at the skin ; ^ they 've got
the roundest skull of anything.'

I That is, loup-cervier, or Canada lynx, but the hunters
pronounce it lucivee or loucerfee.

48 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

" ^ But its front teeth are flat/ sings out
Joe.

" ^ Then it 's a man^ says Lewey, and
he goes and looks.

" And he saw that it had one front tooth
gone just like Larry, so they had n't no
great of a doubt who it was to. They
stuck it up in the fork of a tree and spotted
a line in to it, so 's his friends could find
it again if they wanted it, and that 's the
last that ever I heerd of it."

After this manner the man who broke
the jam at the Dry Way came finally, as
a bare and eyeless skull, — that blasphem-
ing skull that once had a tongue in it, —
to sit like some foul bird in a tree-fork
through wintry storms ; wherefore the men
who had known him felt that even the
judgment which had fallen upon him was
insufficient, and this strange dismember-
ment was by the hand of God ordained as
a warning against profane swearing. No
wonder that they thought his ghost un-
quiet, and that even on a hot June day it
might be out in a red felt hat for a stroll
along the Dry Way.

Ill

HYMNS BEFORE BATTLE

HYMNS BEFORE BATTLE^

The golden noon of a young June day,
and fourteen strong men swinging down
the carry-path to the " putting-in place ; "
on each man's shoulder his heavy peavey,
clanking its iron jaw as he jolted over rocks
and hollows ; on each man's feet heavy
shoes, studded, heel and sole, with inch-
long calks of sharpened steel ; on each
man's body rags and tatters, worn and
weathered from their first monotony of
aniline and shoddy into gear indescribably
barbarous and fantastic.

^ This story is reprinted from the Bangor Daily Com-
mercialy 1897, at the request of several who have desired
its republication among these later stories. Though true
in spirit, it does not deal with an actual occurrence at the
place named, and therefore is not entitled to admission
among these matter-of-fact stories. And yet the owner
of another " Nancy," the late Roderick R. Park, when
contractor of the Mattawamkeag Drive, used sometimes
to call his men off for a dance just like this one, and the
good old tune of Roy's Wife'' was known wherever
he and his fiddle went.

52 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

There was a jam forming below on the
Horse Race, — a great upreared mass of
logs, like a pile of gigantean jackstraws
or the side-swath of a cyclone, where all
the wreck is flung, up-ended, interlaced,
triply bound and welded, a confusion which
seemed inextricable. And volunteers were
called to pick the jam.

These were the men, whose armed heels
smote fire from the rocks, whose peavies
jangled a battle-note, whose short step
lengthened to a stride as they saw the
river sweeping past and their boats before
them, saw the rapids race at the tail of
Ambajemackomas and heard on the up-
stream draught of air the ominous war
of a full flood growling on the Horse Race
below, and (either you dread it or it draws
you, when you hear the River calling so)
came swinging down the carry in haste
to meet their foe. It is a pretty sight to see
a phalanx of picked watermen rally, as if
by bugle call, to face their ancient enemy,
the River.

Yet there, in sight of the river, one of
them fell out.

BEFORE BATTLE

" Ho, hi ! See here ! " he called to those
ahead.

The fourteen men with peavies on their
shoulders, clustering together, stood stock-
still, like old herons round a fishing-pool,
their necks craned over, and gazed at
something in the damp, black soil.

" Gee whipperty ! " said one, " that
there 's a woman's track !

Then, as if contradicted, though no one
spoke, — " Yes, sir, that is ! There 's been
a woman here.''

Women were unknown in that place at
that season. Yet there, under the over-
arch of an alder, was a slender footprint.
They could tell you to-day, those men,
though it is twenty years since, just how
long and how wide was that woman's track,
carelessly imprinted in the mud beside the
carry-path.

Very unchivalrous the world counts
these woodsmen; — very little the world
knows about their ways and romances, for
nowhere does romance bear a more fra-
grant blossom or bloom so long. The
sprig of cedar, many years preserved,

54 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

because with it a woman crowned an act
of daring ; the wild flower, pressed in the
crumpled corner of a greasy pocketbook,
because a woman called it beautiful ; the
chance track in the roadway where a week
before an unknown woman stepped, kept
from obliteration just because she was a
woman, — no line of life that men follow
to-day comes so close to the high mark
of mediaeval chivalry with its superb faith
in womankind, regardless of the faults of
individual women.

But the life is rough ? So surely was
chivalry ! Rougher than we know for. Its
faith saved it ; and what grew into mari-
olatry in the past is still, in the unromantic
present, the better part of many other
rough men's religion.

"Yes, sir," said the bearded man; "there
was a woman here wunst. Jee-e-e-roozlum,
there wuz ! "

Confronted by this evidence of a woman's
presence, his speech underwent a sudden
censorship, and, like rags in a broken win-
dow, any inoffensive word was stuflfed in
to fill the gaps.

BEFORE BATTLE

" There was ; gee-e-e-whittaker, there
wuz ! It 's somethin' to make account of.
The wangan chist 's this end the carry, and
there ain't nothin' can't wait. Hike out
old Nancy, and let 's break her down."

The speaker was boss of his crew, a man
possessed of a little authority over those
below him and of more over those above
him, who had learned to let him take his
own way without meddling ; for he was
one of those men who, discountenancing
the maritime maxim, can break orders and
defy owners. It has always been the glory
of the West Branch Drive that it had so
many such men, every one of whom placed
the welfare of those logs above his own
life, could have handled the whole drive
if there were need, and whose insubordi-
nation would never have gone so far as to
endanger the least part of their trust. No
matter how mutinously they spoke, they
never failed to be where they were needed,
and that was all P. L. D. asked of them.

There is neither time nor room for fid-
dles on the drive, but this man had wanted
Nancy, and he carried Nancy. If he had

56 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

wanted the moon, he would have put it in
the wangan chest just as boldly. And now,
when called to pick off a jam, he coolly
halts his men in the face of danger and
death — because the occasion is notable —
to have a scrape at the old fiddle.

In the faces of some there is question-
ing what John Ross will say. Whom he
rebukes.

" What '11 John Ross say ? Don't care
what John Ross '11 say ! Ain't this a free
country? What did old Jack Mann say
to his boss when he knocked off at noon
with all his crew because it looked like
sprinklin' ? — that he 'd ^ a sight ruther
have the good-will of a whole crew than of
one man, any day.' 'N' so 'd I ! John Ross
ain't a-runnin' this crew now ; / be ! There
ain't nothin' in partic'lar 'bout a little side
jam that can't wait. Stick up your darts,
boys ; rowse a boat out, an' all hands bow
to pardners."

In a trice they were ready. The peavies
plunged their iron beaks into the earth,
the driving-boat turned bottom up in a
twinkling, and while the boss was still

BEFORE BATTLE

groping in the wangan chest for his fiddle-
case, the two supplest men had unbuckled
and cast aside their spiked driving-shoes.
It was a dance on the drive — a dance by-
proxy ; for the pitchy, flat bottom of a
driving-boat is an area too limited for a
general engagement. So while the fiddler
sawed and tightened his strings, and the
bare-footed dancers sprung their knees to
get them in condition, the audience dis-
posed itself to watch.

The fiddle tuned, the fiddler seated, he
touches the horse-hair to his cheek, then
holds the bow upright and Nancy tucked
beneath his chin, waiting for them to call
the tune.

" ' Money Musk ' ! "

" ' Fisher's Hornpipe ' ! "

" ^ Irish Washerwoman ' ! "

" Somethin' 't we sing out in the States,"
cries a dissenting basso ; " give us a real
Christian tune ! "

There is rough water below them and
a jam to pick; and — are they moved to
sing hymns of prayer and praise ?

O innocent, the fiddler knows them

58 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

better. He bends his head a moment to
catch the humor of his audience moved to
retrospection by the sight of a woman's
footprint, and away whisk jigs and "penny-
royals " while the expectant dancers stand
agape.

Up and down plays his wrist, in and out
works his elbow, forward and back sways
his body ; he treads his foot ; a musical
ecstasy carries him beyond the bounds of
his own mean accomplishments, and he
plays with fervor what his men have called
for — a most Christian song. It begins, —

I 'm lonesome since I crossed the hill.
And o'er the moor and valley."

And they sang. Of course they sang, —
bass and tenor, how they sang, for they
all knew that, — sang till the clearer voices
floated high above the slender birch-tops
and the bass swam midway in the clear
June sunshine, and beneath, mingling with
the roll of the rapids, rumbled the un-
dertone of those who could not sing, yet
would not refuse to try. It came like rain
in drought, freshening dusty foliage and

BEFORE BATTLE 59

slaking the thirst of parching hillsides —
this most Christian song of women re-
membered in the face of danger.

The bee shall honey taste no more.
The dove become a ranger.
The falling waves shall cease to roar.
Ere I shall seek to change her.
• The vows we register' d above
Shall ever cheer and bind me.
In constancy to her I love.
The girl I 've left behind me."

The logs slipped past by twos and threes
and half-dozens, going to throw themselves
upon the abattisof the ever-increasing jam
below. And still the fiddler bent above
, his fiddle. Young men have sweethearts,
older men have wives, and once more the
bow is laid to the catgut, to draw from it
a tribute to the wives at home.

" Roy's Wife of Valdevally " nods the
bow-paddle to the stroke-oar. They did
not know the words, nor that it had words,
nor that they were not altogether a com-
pliment, — that lay all in the title, — but
the fine old tune of " Roy's Wife of Aldi-
valloch " was known wherever Nancy felt

6o THE PENOBSCOT MAN

the bow. It had been played many times
before on that river, though never when
John Ross was waiting for a crew.

That ended, once more the bow hugged
the fiddle. To young men, sweethearts ; to
their seniors, wives ; but men old enough
to handle the bow of a driving-boat have
children and homes as well, and the ficMler
played once more while John Ross waited.

Up through the tangle of undergrowth
by the river's edge, hastening from the jam
below, jingling his dippers as he ran, puffed
and sweated the luncheon-boy, with orders
to " swear them into a two-forty ; for it had
caught on at the middle and formed clear
across the river, was rolling up all the time,
and would hold till everything under-
ground froze stiff" (so the message ran),
" if they did n't shove a crew down double
quick and break the jam ; and why in —
in all hemlock, had n't they been there long
before ? "

An order enjoining unlimited, idiomatic,
artistic swearing is a commission of honor
to any luncheon-boy, and this one, as he
posted up the drivers' path by the river-

BEFORE BATTLE 6i

bank, was marshaling his vocabulary so as
to do him credit, when, though full of his
errand, he heard the fiddle, soft and sweet,
— for the bow itself crooned the words to
silent listeners, —

In mansions or palaces, where'er I roam.

Be it never so humble, there 's no place like home."

The luncheon-boy loitered along at a
walk, then sauntered, and finally, in spite
of his hot haste, waited till the last slow
stave had sung itself away to an echo.

" Middle jam," said he, shamefully neg-
lecting the opportunity for elegant pro-
fanity ; " everything piling up chock-full.
Run down lively ; them 's John Ross's
orders."

Fourteen men sprang to their feet and
ran out the batteaus ; the fiddle shut it-
self up in the case ; the peavies leaped into
the boats ; oars, axes, paddles, and all flew
into position, and the two driving-boats,
fully manned, with bowmen and steersmen
standing in their places, darted out into
the swirling current that tails down from
Ambajemackomas. Behind them were

62 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

songs of sweetheart, wife, and home ; and
ahead, around the bend whence the up-
stream draught of air brought the growl of
the rapids. Death and Danger sat waiting
for them on the middle jam. Were their
chances for life and victory less for that
quarter hour's devotion at the one shrine
all woodsmen worshipfuUy recognize, —
the memory of home and woman ?

IV

DEATH OF THOREAU'S
GUIDE

THE DEATH OF THOREAU'S
GUIDE

The strangest monument a man ever had
in sacred memory, — a pair of old boots.
For a token of respect and admiration, love
and lasting grief, — just a pair of old river-
driver's boots hung on the pin-knot of a
pine. Big and buckled ; bristling all over
the sole with wrought steel calks ; gashed
at the toes to let the water out ; slashed
about the tops into fringes with the tally
of his season's work, less only the day
which saw him die ; reddened by water ;
cracked by the sun, — worn-out, weather-
rotting old boots, hanging for years on the
pine-tree, disturbed by no one. The river-
drivers tramped back and forth beneath
them, a red-shirted multitude ; they boated
along the pond in front and drove their
logs past, year after year ; they looked at
the tree with the big cross cut deep in its

66 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

scaly bark, and always left the boots hang-
ing on the limb. They were the Gov-
ernor's boots, Joe Attien's boots, they
belonged to Thoreau's guide.'

The pine-tree had seen the whole. It
was old and it was tall. Its head stretched
up so high that it could look over the
crest of Grand Pitch, tremendous fall
though it is, right up where Grand Falls
come churning down to their final leap
into Shad Pond. It had been looking up
the river in the sunshine of that summer
morning and had seen the whole, — the
overloaded boat that set out to run the
falls, the wreck in the rapids, the panic of
the crew, the men struggling among logs
and rocks, the brave attempt at rescue, and
the dead, drowned bulk, which had once
been the Governor, as it was tumbled down
over the Grand Pitch into the pond be-
low. The pine-tree had stood guard over
it for days, and when, from its four days

' Thoreau spells the name "Aitteonj'' I have pre-
ferred the form found on his tombstone, " Attien," be-
cause it indicates both the pronunciation and the deri-
vation. For it is not Indian, but the French fitienne, or
Stephen.

THOREAU'S GUIDE 67

in the grave of the waters, it rose again,
the pine-tree still kept watch over it, until,
on the sixth morning, the searchers found
it there. " And when they found his body
they cut a cross into a tree by the side
of the pond, and they hung up his boots
in the tree and they stayed there always,
because everybody knew that they was the
Governor's boots."

If ever Henry David Thoreau showed
himself lacking in penetration, it was when
he failed to get the measure of Joseph
Attien. True, Joe was young then — he
never lived to be old ; yet a man who, dy-
ing at forty-one, is so long remembered,
must have shown some signs of promise
at twenty-four.' But Thoreau hired an
Indian to be aboriginal. One who said
" By George ! " and made remarks with a
Yankee flavor was contrary to his hypo-
thesis of what a barbarian ought to be. It

^ The newspapers said he was thirty-five when he died,
but his gravestone says plainly, "forty years and seven
months."" It is interesting to learn that one who lived
so well and died so generously was born on Christmas
Day.

68 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

did not matter that this was the sort of man
who gave up his inside seat and rode sixty-
miles on the top of the stage in the rain
that a woman might be sheltered; — all
the cardinal virtues without aboriginality
would not have sufficed Mr. Thoreau for
a text. He missed his opportunity to tell
us what manner of man this was, and so Joe
Attien's best chance of being remembered
lies, not in having been Henry Thoreau's
guide on a brief excursion, but in being
just brave, honest, upright Joseph Attien,
a man who was loved and lamented be-
cause he had the quality of goodness. " His
death just used the men all up," said a
white ri verm an years afterward ; " after
that some of the best men wa'n't good for
anything all the rest of the drive."

I could give, as I have gleaned it here
and there, the testimony to his worth, the
statements of one and another that he was
not only brave but good, an open-hearted,
patient, forbearing sort of a man, renowned
for his courage and skill in handling a boat,
but loved for his mild justness. " He was
just like a father to us," said a white man

THOREAU'S GUIDE 69

who had been in his boat. Thirty-three
years after his death I heard a head lum-
berman, who also had served two years in
his boat, a very silent man, break out into
voluble reminiscence at merely seeing Joe
Attien's picture. But there is a story, in-
disputably authentic, which shows better
than anything else the largeness of the man.

He had been slandered by a white man
-whom he had thought his friend, in a way
which not only caused him distress of mind,
but was calculated to interfere materially
with his election to the office of tribal gov-
ernor, the most coveted honor within an
Indian's grasp, and that year elective for
the first time.' The incident occurred just

' His epitaph is wrong in asserting that he inherited
the title of governor. The office had been a life-office,
hereditary in the Attien family, who were chiefs 5 but
at Joseph's father's death it was made annual and elec-
tive. Joseph Attien won his elections by popular vote
against great opposition, and he carried seven out of the
eight elections held up to the time of his death. The
eighth — by the intervention of the so-called << Special
Law," passed by the state to reduce the friction between
the parties — was the New Party's first election, none of
Joseph Attien' s party, the Old Party, or Conservatives,
voting that year.

70 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

before his first election in 1862, — for he
was governor seven times. Hurt to the
quick, he avoided his former friend, yet
said nothing. When he discovered that the
false accusation had arisen from a wholly
innocent and most natural mistake, with-
out a word in his own justification, leaving
the charge to stand undenied, he renewed
the old friendship, and his friend never
knew what just cause he had given for
resentment till, years after Joe's death,
it was accidentally revealed by one who
had heard the misunderstanding explained.
Such was the man.

If you ask the men who were there at
the time how Joseph Attien died, they will
never suggest that it was accident or the
hand of God. More or less emphatically,
according to their natures and the vivid-
ness of their recollection, they will say right
out, " Dingbat Prouty did it ; it was Ding-
bat Prouty drownded Joe Attien." They
will cheerfully admit that this is not a man
to be spoken of slightingly, because he is
a great waterman ; but upon this point

THOREAU'S GUIDE

there is only one opinion, — that he forced
Joe Attien to run a bad place against his
better judgment, for the mere sake of
showing off. " He pushed himself in/'
— "He had n't no business in that boat
at all." — " Prouty drownded Joe Attien,
everybody who was there says so." —
" He had n't no business in that boat and
did n't belong there anyway, but he said he
was going to run them falls, and he did
run 'em."

It is very hard to tell a true story, and
the more one knows about the facts, the
harder it is to make a story of them. Here
was a simple tale of how the inordinate am-
bition of one man to win a name for him-
self brought grief upon the whole drive.
The next turn of the kaleidoscope gave a
wholly different combination. For I took
what I had gathered to John Ross himself.
" Is this straight? " And he said : " No ;
you are all wrong there. Prouty belonged
in that boat ; he had been bowman of it
about two days. It was my orders for them
to go down and pick a jam on the Heater,
and they were going. I was right there and

72 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

saw the whole of it, and I never blamed
Prouty."

But why, then, should the men have
blamed him ? No exculpation could be
more complete than this. There is no
appeal from what John Ross says he
ordered and saw executed. Why do not
the men know this ? Instead of telHng a
simple tale, are we undertaking to square
the mental circle ? For, with nearly two
hundred men close at hand, it seems pre-
posterous that the facts should not have
become generally known ; it is still more
incredible to suppose that, thinking inde-
pendently, they could all have reached the
same false conclusion ; but that, having been
cross-examined in all sorts of ways for four
and thirty years, they should never have
varied from their first error is inconceivable.
Why do the men still hold Charles Prouty
responsible, if he was not to blame ?

From being a study of facts, the story
turns into a question of psychology. Why
is it that when one has been looking at red
too long he sees green and keeps on seeing
green, even when there is no green there?

THOREAU'S GUIDE

That is the clue. A man does not get a
name like "Dingbat" and keep it all his
life for nothing. Therefore, after the men
had gazed fixedly upon the commanding
excellence of Joseph Attien ; after they had
seen him pass beyond their ken, " all the
trumpets," as it were, " sounding for him
on the other side; " when they turned away
and looked at the man whom fate had
elected to stand beside him that day, what
would one expect them to see by contrast ?
Green ! very green ! And to keep right
on seeing — green!

Having affirmed the worth of Joseph
Attien and the warm esteem in which all
held him, it remains to show how, because
he was placed in too sharp a contrast with
such a man, Charles Prouty incurred a blame
which his chief says was none of his.

We come now to the story. Chance
gave to it a fitting frame — grand scenery,
bright sunshine, a date of distinction, the
eye of the master. You are never to for-
get that up on a log-jam, just below where
this happened, stood himself — John Ross.

74 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

He ordered the boat down ; he saw it go;
he sent another to the rescue; he reported
this to me ; it stands authenticated. But
what the men saw and felt, that which is
unofficial, that which represents the cur-
rent of the story and carries us on to the
end, I gathered for myself among them.

On the drive there is no distinction of
days. Holidays or Sundays, the drivers
know no difference ; one week's end and
the next one's beginning are all the same
to them. The Fourth of July now is
marked for them by no other suitable re-
cognition than extremely early rising.

But it used not so to be. In the old
days, when it was a point of pride to have
the logs in boom by the last of June, the
men were free to celebrate on the Fourth.
To them the Fourth of July was the great-
est day of all the year. Like boys just out
of school, they were free from work, free
from restraint, free to make just as much
noise as they pleased, and, having plenty
of money in their pockets wherewith to
purchase all sorts of a good time, they

THOREAU'S GUIDE 75

enjoyed a glorious liberty. The Fourth
was never a quiet day in Bangor, if the
drives were in the boom.

However, the year of our Lord 1870 is
distinctly chronicled as one of the most un-
eventful ever known ; nothing at all going
on but a church levee across the river in
Brewer, so that the police loafed out the
Fourth in weary and unwonted idleness.
The drives were late that year, so very late
that, though the head of the West Branch
Drive was some miles downstream, the
rear of it rested on the Grand Falls of the
Indian Purchase. The hands had been
leaving the day before, so as to get home
for the Fourth; the water was falling; the
whole drive was belated and short-handed ;
the head men were worrying ; no one had
any time to remember that it was a legal
holiday.

That is, no one remembered it except
the Chronic Shirk. His rights had been
assailed, and, having found a Temporary
Cripple, who could not escape by flight
from his unwelcome company, he insisted
on arguing the case, and volleyed back his

76 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

opinions of working on a legal holiday
with an explosiveness which reminded one
of the reports of a bunch of fire-crackers.

It was "Rip — rip — rip — bang! But
he did n't like this workin' on a Fourth er
Ju/y/ The Declaration of Independuns
had said — that it was a man's right —
on the Fourth er July — to git as tight
as Lewey's cow ; and he did rip — rip —
rip — object — to bein' defrauded out of
his constitoot'nal rights ! "

He was a sun-baked, stubble-faced fel-
low; less troubled with clothes than with
the want of patches, but with shirt and
skin about one color where the sun had
toned them to each other around the more
ancient rents ; and he sat in a niche in the
log-jam, expectorating tobacco forcibly and
to great distances, and swore voluminously
about his ill-luck in not being somewhere
else. Just then he had nothing to do. He
was an expert at picking out jobs where
there was nothing to do. This time he was
waiting for his mate, who had gone for an
axe, and not a stroke of work had he done
since his mate left him. There it was, a

THOREAU'S GUIDE

bright sunny morning about seven o'clock,
a good time to work, and the logs ricked
up like jackstraws on both sides of the
falls ; the whole river in that confusion
which the rear has to clean up and leave
tidy ; plenty of work for this fellow to do
with his peavey in picking off singles and
rolling in little handfuls caught along the
edges, and helping to do his share of the
setting to rights ; but instead, he sat on a
log-jam in the sun, and spat more vigor-
ously and swore more violently as it grew
upon him how ill the world was using him
in making him work on the Fourth of
July.

The Cripple, unable to escape, tried to
divert him from his melancholy. " Well,
Tobias Johnson's bo't got down all right,"
he remarked.

Tobias Johnson and his crew had but
just run the Blue Rock Pitch. It was to
see the boats go down that the Cripple
had crawled out upon the logs. The water
being very bad that morning, what Tobias
Johnson had done was bound to be a topic
of conversation all that hot day among little

78 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

groups of men working on the logs. Even
the Shirk ought to have whirled at such a
glittering conversational lure. Instead he
sulked.

" I 'd be rip — rip — ripped, if I was
seen runnin' these here falls to-day. It 's
a damned shame to have to work on the
Fourth er July anyway. Head men that
knowed beans from bedbugs would ha'
had the whole jim-bang drive in long
ago/' and he exploded a whole bunch of
crackers on the heads of the offending
contractors of the drive. " Here we be
a-swillin' sow-belly an' Y. E. B.'s/ an'
down to Bangor, don't I know jes' 's well
as can be, Deacon Spooner has brought
up a thousand pounds o' salmon to Low's
Market, an' is reportin' all about the sun-
stroke to the schoolhouse, an' the camp-
meetin'they are gettin'up down to Whisgig
on Shoo-Fly, an' salmon enough for all
hands an' the cook."

' That is, yellow -eyed beans. Pork and beans are the
river-driver's staple of diet, as well as the lumberman's,
and not as much relished in midsummer as in the colder
season.

THOREAU'S GUIDE

(Deacon Spooner was a sort of summer
Santa Claus, who purveyed imaginary in-
formation and real Penobscot River salmon.
He was held in high local esteem, but he
went out of print about this time, and the
great volley of oaths which the Shirk shot
off at the merry and inoffensive deacon,
though they may not account for his dis-
appearance, would provide good reason for
looking for him among the damned.)

The Cripple tried to get away, but he
was too closely followed. Then, deciding
that talking was better than listening, he
took the reins of conversation. " Bi must
have found it awful rough water," said he.
" Don't believe there '11 be not another
bo't attempt it to-day, with the water
slacking so. Say, did you hear that yis-
terday Joe Attien tried to git Con Murphy
to leave Tobias's crew an' come into his
bo't ? An' Con said he liked his own crew,
an' did n't want to change, not even to be
in Joe's bo't. I heerd that he got Ed Con-
ley out of Lewey Ketchum's bo't, now
Lewey 's left the drive. Speaks pretty well
for Tobias, though, don't it ? "

8o THE PENOBSCOT MAN

The discontented one turned impar-
tially from Deacon Spooner and damned
Tobias.

" Jim Hill ! " said the other, " how them
logs has took to runnin' ! They 're goin'
it high, wide, an' lively. .That stops all
bo't capers for one while. Any bo't that
had it in mind to rival Bi Johnson had
better think twice about it before they
get out into this mix-up on slack water.
Guess our fun 's up an' I mought 's well
be crawlin' back to camp."

" Guess I mought 's well stay right here
where I be," said the Shirk ; " John Ross
is up there on that dry jam east side, an'
I 'd jes' 's soon be where I can keep an eye
on him."

The Cripple made a few painful, hobbling
steps over the logs and had reached the
crest of the jam, when he turned with his
hand shading his eyes and looked down
toward the Blue Rock Pitch, where a boat
was drawn up on the shore and the crew
stood waiting.

" Say, though," he shouted to the Shirk,
trying to make himself heard above the

THOREAU'S GUIDE 8i

water, " looks like they was talkin' about
runnin' after all ! Who is it ? make 'em
out ? "

The grumbler put up his head cau-
tiously to make sure that John Ross was
attending to his own business, before he
ran briskly to the peak of the jam, and
announced that it was that ding-ding-
danged Injun, Joe Attien ; could tell him
by his bigness.

" Hain't he the perfect figure of a man,
though ! " broke in the other in admiration;
" pity his heft keeps him from his rightful
place in the bow."

Joe Attien weighed two hundred and
twenty-live and, because of his great weight
and strength, always captained his boat
from the stern, although in running down
quick water the bow is the place of honor.

The leisurely one, having made sure that
he was getting the right man, proceeded to
curse Joe Attien and all his forbears. Then
he sat down upon the logs and resumed his
original lamentation. " Now down Bangor
way to-day they 'd be doin' somp'n wuth
lookin' at — boss races an' bo't races an' " —

82 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

" Joe 'd be in the canoe race sure," in-
terrupted the other.

" Not by a long chalk ! " said the
grumbler ; " don't you see he 's governor
agin ? Don't you rec'lect that last time,
when they made him a ding-danged, no-
good judge, an' him one of the best pad-
dles in the tribe, a rip — rip — rip — split-
ting good man on a paddle, all because he
was a ding-dang-donged governor ? "

The other man admitted the cogency
of the argument. " But say," said he,
" that 's the real thing there. Ain't that
Dingbat talkin' up to Joe ? "

They watched the rapid, incisive move-
ments of a slender, agile young fellow, out-
lined against Joe's bulk. " Dinged little
weasel," muttered the grumbler, identify-
ing him ; " so durn spry 't he don't cast no
shadder ! "

Then he relapsed once more into his
reflective mood. " Now down Bangor way
now, you bet, — oh, boss races an' bo't
races an' canoe races, an' ^ Torrent ' and
^ Delooge ' a-squirtin' out in the Square,
an' cirkiss an' greased pig, an' tub races

THOREAU'S GUIDE 83

an' velocerpede races, — there '11 be somp'n
down there to-day wuth lookin' at, an' up
here nothin' but this dod-blasted ol' river
an' a ding-dang passel o' logs ! "

" Say," said the other, " I can't quite
make that out yet. I ain't a-catchin' on to
that performance. There 's McCausland
an' Tomer an' Joe Solomon an' Curran
an' Conley, they all belong — but where 's
Steve Stanislaus ? An' that little Dingbat
— what 's he doin' with a paddle there ? "

" Wants Joe to run the falls."

" Well, but he ain't in Joe's bo't ! "

" Course not, little rumscullion ! That 's
it ! He 's failed to get his own crew in,
most like, an' now he 's stumpin' Joe to
take him along o' his crew. You watch an'
see him do it. He ain't a-goin' to let Bi
Johnson have the name of bein' the only
man that dares to run these falls to-day,
not if he can help it. He '11 shake the
rafters o' heaven but he '11 show us that
he 's every bit as good a waterman as To-
bias Johnson."

" What makes him light on Joe ? and
where 's Steve ? "

84 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

The men did not know as yet that the
day before, when the crews reorganized at
the Lower Lakes, Steve Stanislaus, who
was Joe Attien's friend and cousin and
physical counterpart, had left Joe's boat.
But all sorts of low cunning being read-
able to the Shirk, he was not at loss for
an explanation.

" Well, don't you see, he 's cut Steve
out some ways. Joe handlin' stern, that
gives him a chance to go in the bow, and
that 's right on the way to a bo't of his own,
and what he could n't get with no other
man. He don't ship to be no midshipman
in the maulin' they are goin' to git. He 's
figgerin' how to put hisself at a premum as
a crack man."

" Reel Dingbat trick," muttered the
other. " Joe knows that this ain't no run-
nin' water to-day ; just wicked to try to run
here, the way things is now."

" Don't want to, don't have to," retorted
the swearer, for once omitting the garnish
of his speech. And it was more true than
most epigrams. Joe's orders to go down
with a boat did not imply that he was to

THOREAU'S GUIDE 85

run the Blue Rock Pitch against his judg-
ment. A waterman of his reputation could
dare to be prudent. All the spectators
thought that he intended to take out above
the pitch and carry by. Then they saw
him pick up his long paddle.

The Shirk pricked up his ears and
began to be more cheerful. " Looks like
somp'n was goin' to happen now ! he
chippered. " There they are a-gettin' of
her ready. Now they 're runnin' her out.
There 's Dingbat takin' bow. Wonder
what they are goin' to do with that spare
man? Which one of them rip — rip —
rippin' galoots do you s'pose Joe '11 be
leavin' behind ? "

That seventh man in the boat was what
the men never understood ; it gave the
color to the accusation that Prouty pushed
himself in. Seven men is a boat's crew
when working on logs, but in running
dangerous places they carry but six or even
four men. It would seem as if, planning
not to run, Joe had his log-working crew,
and then, changing his mind suddenly,
forgot to leave behind the extra man.

86 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

" Gosh ! how rough the water is ! said
the Cripple ; " all choked up with jams
both sides, and the logs running to beat
hell. They don't stand one chance not
in — My soul! — but he's puttin' that
spare man in on the lazy seat ! Well,
what you must do you will do." It was
the inbred fatalism of his class, which
makes them stoical.

Simultaneously the grumbler fired off a
volley of curses which made the air smoke.
" Rip — rip — rip — bang ! — bang ! ! If
that Go-donged Injun ain't a-shippin' a
Maddywamkeag crew ! " (In the cant of
the river a "Mattawamkeag crew" means
all the men a boat will hold.)

The Shirk was fully alive now. He
jumped up and took his peavey from the
log side of him. " Guess I '11 be moseyin'
right along down now," he chirped. Then
he set out running over the logs at a lively
pace, trailing his peavey behind him. He
anticipated seeing something fully equal to
greased pig and velocipede races.

There was not much to see that time.
The catastrophe came at once, before they

THOREAU'S GUIDE 87

were fairly started. The water was very
rough that morning — on a falling driving-
pitch it is always roughest. There was that
crowning current heaped up in the middle
that would push a boat up on the shore ;
there were the log-jams making the chan-
nels narrow and crooked ; there were the
loose logs running free that would elbow
and ram a boat and crowd her off when
she tried to avoid them ; there were the
doubtful, treacherous channels, creatures
of the log-jams along the banks and of the
fickle current, new with every differing
condition, never to be fully memorized ;
there were the rocks, not less cruel be-
cause cushioned with great boils of water;
and there were the boat's own weight and
tremendous momentum. No thorough-
bred waterman will ever undertake to say
how fast a boat can run in a rapid ; for he
does not know himself. He says, " Very
fast,'' and turns the topic to all-day records.

Still the great sharp-nosed boat had as
little cause to apprehend disaster as any
boat could have had. She bore a picked
crew ; she obeyed Joe Attien ; and she was

88 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

a staunch and trusty boat, very wise about
all the ways of water. She knew all kinds
and how to take them. There were the
huge boils, those frightful, brandy-colored
boils, streaked full of yellow foam-threads
spinning from a hissing centre ; and there
were the slicks, where a great rock be-
trayed his lurking-place only by the tail
of glassy current below, — safe are such
places, for the rock lies above them ; and
there were the ridgy manes of white water-
curls, where the slopes of two great rocks
met and rolled the water backward; — but
she knew how to take them all ; she was
prepared for perils on all sides, danger
unintermittent, whether she took it slick,
or bit into the foam with her long beak,
or caught it raw and crosswise beneath her
flaring gunwales. What she did not expect
was that her peril would come before she
had caught the set of the current at all ;
no one looked for that, not even the Shirk,
who was running fast so as to be right on
hand when she swamped, and was address-
ing to them various select remarks not in-
tended to be heard above the roar of the

THOREAU'S GUIDE 89

water, such as, " Guess you got your belly
full this time, old fellow ; " and, " Go it,
boys, you '11 get plumb to hell this trip/'
It was nothing to one of his kind that
seven men stood in deadly peril, and the
show of the moment he was craftily neg-
lecting that he might the better witness the
closing spectacle ; but he never dreamed
that it would come as it did.

It was a very simple accident ; the
dragon-fly, with bulging eyes, rustling in
zigzag flight along the river's brink, might
have reported what he saw as well as could
a man. There was the long, lean boat, blue
without and painted white within, lying with
pointed stern and longer, tapering snout,
steeving sharply, like a huge fish half out
of water ; within her the line of red-shirted
men, their finny oars fringing her battered
sides, the stripling Prouty high up in the
bow, too eager to snatch the honors of which
he has won so many fairly since ; then the
row of seated men — ragged red shirts,
sorely weathered ; hard red knuckles, tense
on the oar-butts ; sun-burned faces under
torn brims, or hatless ; sun-scorched eyes.

90 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

winking through sun-bleached lashes; all,
Yankee and Irishman and Province-man,
black-eyed Indian and blue-eyed Indian,
waiting on big Joe Attien towering in the
stern, confident that what he did would
be done right. Seven men, and four were
looking backward to the shore and three
were facing forward toward the water, four
one way and three the other, as if emblem-
atic of the coming moment when they
should be divided by three and by four,
for life, for death. What they thought
and how they felt, who could tell now ?
but out of all those there, the man's heart
which would have been best worth reading
was that spare man's on the lazy seat, who
knew rough water, and could see ahead,
and who had nothing at all to do. If he
unbuckled his stout, calked brogans, and
slipped them off his feet, who could say
whether it was done from fear or from
foresight ?

Then the poles dip, the long spruce
iron-shod poles at bow and stern, the oars
sweep shallow water, and, splashing and
gritting gravel as they push oflF, the poles

THOREAU'S GUIDE

dipping one side and the other, abreast
and backward, Hke the long legs of an un-
certain-minded crane-fly, they shove her
out.

And then was their black fate close upon
them : she did not swing to the current ;
she was too heavy ; the crew were raw to
one another and to the boat; bow and stern
did not respond as they always had done
when Steve Stanislaus and Joe handled
boat, as their old crews still say, "just
like one man." Logy and bewildered,
instead of turning promptly to the current,
the old boat let the water catch her under-
neath her side. It shot her straight across
the channel, right among the ugly rocks
on the other shore, close above the Blue
Rock Pitch. Before she could be straight-
ened, the River took her in his giant
hands and smashed her side against a
rock, smote her down with such a crash
that the men along the banks who saw
and heard it cannot be convinced that she
was not wrecked ; and some who saw her
fill so suddenly still declare that her whole
bottom was torn off as you rip the peel

THE PENOBSCOT MAN

from a mandarin orange. That is not
true ; she was not much hurt. But eigh-
teen hundred pounds of boat and men
were hurled upon that sunken rock with
the full force of the River. The port side
buckled fearfully ; the ribs groaned and
gave ; the nails screamed as the sharp
rock sheared off their heads, and a long
yellow shaving, ploughed out of her side,
went writhing down the foaming current.
Down to the water's edge dipped the up-
stream gunwale ; in poured the water in a
flood, and before she settled squarely, the
lifted port side showed that long and ugly
scar. What of the shock that sent the man
upon the lazy seat reeling backward, that
tumbled the men at the oars forward upon
their faces, that wrenched their oars from
their hands and threw the batteau seats
from the cleats and sent the spare man's
driving-shoes adrift among the litter of
unshipped seats and useless men ? Un-
manned, unmanageable, full to the lips of
water, and just on the brink of the Blue
Rock Pitch, what could the old boat do?
Joe dropped his useless pole and took his

THOREAU'S GUIDE

paddle, but she could not answer to it, and
bow-heavy with the weight of water run-
ning forward as she felt the incline of the
fall, her stern reeling high in air, her crew,
disarmed and helpless, crowding on the
bowman, she wallowed down that wicked
water among rocks and logs.

So much is fairly certain, but beyond
this no one seems quite sure ; for I can
find no one who saw it. Tobias Johnson's
crew could not, not having eyes in the
backs of their heads, for they had sprung
at once to the rescue in their own boat.
The Shirk, who would have been glad
to see, was out of the running. In his
haste to be on hand, he had tripped him-
self on his peavey and had been plunged
headforemost into a hole in the jam, where,
kicking and clawing, he went off like
Mother Hoyt's powder-horn. (Cursing
his own awkwardness ? No, not a bit !
Damning the men who were struggling in
the water, because they had tripped him
up and hadn't given him a fair chance to
see them die !) Nor did John Ross on his
log-jam see it, though he was so near.

THE PENOBSCOT MAN

" I was on a dry jam right there, but
I had kept Levi Hathorn's boat with me
in case any one should tumble in or any-
thing should happen, and I sent it down
to them — and I don't know any more.
I saw that they were going to have a hard
time, and — and I turned and looked the
other way.'* (Ladies and gentlemen, —
tender-hearted ladies, high-minded gentle-
men,— pause and consider whether, stand-
ing there, yours would have been the tran-
scendent grace that " turned and looked
the other way ! ")

One thing everybody knows, — there
were men in that boat who could not swim ;
there are such in every boat. The others
leaped and swam ; these clung to the boat.
And Joe Attien stayed with them, — not
clinging as they did, buried in water; not
crouching and abject, waiting for the death
that faced him,. — not a coward now, never,
but paddle in hand, because the water ran
too deep for pole-hold, standing astride
his sunken boat, a big, calked foot upon
either gunwale, working to the last ounce
that was in him to drive the sunken wreck

THOREAU'S GUIDE 95

and the men clinging to it into some eddy
or cleft of the log-jams before they were
carried down over the Heater and that
thundering fall of the Grand Pitch. It is
the last one sees of Joe Attien, no one has
reported anything after that; one remem-
bers him always as standing high in the
stern of his boat, dying with and for his men.

The Humane Society gives no medals
for rescues made along the river ; our men
have nothing to show for anything they
have done ; but when all the paeans of
brave deeds are chanted, let some one re-
member to sing the praises of Tobias John-
son's crew. We do not speak of them —
this is not their day. Enough that when
they saw Joe Attien's boat swamp, they all
leaped into their places and swept out to
the rescue. Man after man they pulled in,
heedless of their own safety. The last one
they caught when they were just on the
verge of the Heater, and then somehow,
overloaded as they were, on the brink of
sure death, they swung in and crept back
to the landing-place.

96 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

Ashore they looked over the saved and
called the names of the dead. They had
three, McCausland and Joe Solomon and
Curran. Joe Attien was gone, and Stephen
Tomer, an Indian lad, and Edward Con-
ley of Woodstock, and Dingbat Prouty.
They still hoped-for these, — hope dies
hard, and they knew how difficult it is to
drown a man who resolutely prefers to try
his chances of being hanged. So they and
all who had flocked in to them at the fly-
ing rumor of disaster took up pick-poles,
pickaroons, peavies, whatever might be
used to save a living man or to recover the
body of a drowned one, and set oflF down
the drivers' path which skirts the falls.

There was little hope of finding Joe.
When they saw him go, they all understood
that, dead or alive, they would find him
with his men. But Dingbat had been seen
swimming strongly. If the logs had not
crushed him nor the rocks broken him, he
might yet be picked up in some inshore
cove, where the eddy played, clinging to
the alders, too fordone to pull himself out,
but still alive.

THOREAU'S GUIDE 97

They searched well, and they searched
some time before they found him, — for I
had it from one who was there, — and when
they did discover him, it was the rescuers
who were scant of breath.

" Ga-w-d ! but don't he seem to be
takin' it easy ! " said one.

For a man who had just been through
what he had been through, he certainly
was taking it very easy. He was sitting on
a log out in an eddy, a great huUing-ma-
chine log, peeled by the rocks in rapids,
with tatters of bark hanging to its scarred
sides, bitten to the quick by the ledges,
broomed at the ends by being tumbled
over falls. There in the eddy it was drift-
ing, because it was too big to be dislodged
until some driver prodded it out and over
the Grand Pitch. Unable to escape, it
went sailing round and round, sometimes
butting other logs and ramming the weaker
ones out into the rapids, sometimes nos-
ing up against the line of the current, and
always drawing back again into its quiet
haven, swimming slowly, but swinging
often, ever a little beyond the line of the

98 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

bushes, ever a little inside the line of the
current. The falls-spume gathered in clots
against the side farthest from the eddy's
vortex, and the torrent, as it rushed past,
threw up wavelets that lapped its flanks.
There in the warm morning sunshine, wet
as a drowned rat, his hair plastered over his
sharp-cut face, and the wrinkles round his
nose showing clearer than common, sat the
missing bowman, dripping from every edge
and elbow, but stolidly sucking his pipe.

"Well, I call that nerve!'' remarked
one of the rescuers, viewing him from be-
hind a screen of bushes. He appreciated
the self-command it took for a man con-
siderably more than half drowned and en-
tirely soaked to get out his old pipe, dig
her clean, and clamp her under his spiked
shoe to dry while he peeled his wet to-
bacco down to the solid heart of it, got out
his matches from his little water-tight vial,
and filled and lit her up. They admired
his young bravado and waited a moment
watching him, as, theatrically unconscious
of their presence, which he well enough
observed, he drew at his pipe and swung

THOREAU'S GUIDE 99

with the eddy, his shadow now falling to
the front, now to the rear.

" Ain't he a James Dickey-bird ! " said
another beneath his breath.

Then Dingbat overdid the matter.

"Where's that damned Injun?" he
demanded, suddenly acknowledging their
presence.

The ichor of swift resentment coursed
through their veins; already it was settled
in their minds who was responsible for this
disaster. Here he was, safe enough, hav-
ing saved himself ; Joe Attien was dead
trying to save his crew. As the lightning-
flash sometimes photographs indelibly the
objects nearest where it strikes, so on the
minds of these men that unfeeling ques-
tion branded forevermore the pictures that
stood for those two lives, — Dingbat float-
ing at his ease in the eddy, having looked
out for himself, Joe Attien drowned and
battered and lost among logs and ledges,
willing to lose himself if he might save
his crew. They have never forgotten,
never will forget that diff^erence. To this
day, when you ask one of them who was

100 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

there at the time how Joe Attien died, this
contrast leaps before him, and he says
that Dingbat Prouty did it.

The rapids give place to river meadows,
the meadows grow into salt shore-marshes,
the marshes lose themselves at the verge
of ocean, and a mist creeps up out of the
sea. Time levels and softens all, and draws
a veil of haze across to hide what is un-
pleasantly harsh. So be it ! Let all that is
unworthy, low, or mean be blotted out,
provided that the lights we steer by, the
beacons across the wide waste waters, be
not dimmed; — leave us, O Time, the
memory of men like this !

I was a tiny child when Joe Attien died.
He had been a familiar friend, and often,
no doubt, he fondled me as he did his
own babies. But I do not remember him.
Instead I recall — not clearly, though I
somehow know that it was they — the del-
egation of Indians who came down to ask
my father where they should go to look
for his body. They were tall, and I looked

THOREAU'S GUIDE loi

through their legs as between tree-trunks,
and the shadow of grief on their dark
faces made them like the heavy tops of
the pine-trees, trees of mournfulness and
sighing.

"Spos'n' gov'nor could got pole-holt,
she could saved 'em."

And, " She could saved it herself gov'-
nor, 'cause she strong man and could swim,
but she want to preservation crew."

So my father pondered the problem,
and told them where to look for the body.
" A brick would swim in that water, it is
so strong," said he. " The governor was a
heavy man, but unless he is jammed under
logs or wedged between rocks, he will be
carried right down over Grand Pitch. As
soon as the current slackens, it will drop
him and he will sink in shallow water at
the inlet to the pond. It is hot weather
now, and the water being shoal there, by
the time you can get up river the body will
have risen ; you will find it in the upper
end of Shad Pond."

It all came out as he had predicted.
The body of Edward Conley had been

102 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

picked up above the falls several days be-
fore, but the two Indians they found to-
gether in Shad Pond on Sunday, the sixth
day. They took both the bodies ashore,
and where they landed they cut a deep
cross into a tree ; and because they could
not treat lightly anything which had be-
longed to so brave a man, Joe Attien's
boots they hung upon a limb of the tree.
There the river-drivers left them till they
wasted away, a strange but sincere memo-
rial of a good man.

THE GRAY ROCK OF ABOL

THE GRAY ROCK OF ABOL

The region of which I speak is a dreary region ... by the borders
of the river . . . and there is no quiet there, nor silence. . . .
The waters of the river . . . palpitate forever and forever beneath
the red eye of the sun. . . . But there is a boundary to their
realm — the boundary of the dark, horrible, lofty forest. . . .

And mine eyes fell upon a huge gray rock which stood
by the shore of the river. . . . And the rock was gray, and
ghastly, and tall, — and the rock was gray. . . .

" And I looked, . . . and there stood a man upon the sum-
mit of the rock. . . .

"And mine eyes fell upon the countenance of the man,
and his countenance was wan with terror. . . . And the man
shuddered, and turned his face away, and fled afar off, in haste,
so that I beheld him no more. ' ' — Poe.

This is the story of the man who was
drowned at the Gray Rock of Abol. Here
is the whole story — all sides of it : make
of it what you will.

"The Indian thought that we should
lie by on Sunday/' writes Thoreau, and it
is not the only instance where Thoreau
naively chronicles some attempt on the
part of Joe Polls to bring his manners up

io6 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

to the standards of woods etiquette. " Said
he,^ We come here lookum things, look all
round; but come Sunday, lock up all that,
and then Monday look again.' He spoke
of an Indian of his acquaintance who had
been with some ministers to Ktaadn, and
had told him how they conducted. This
he described in a low and solemn voice.
' They make a long prayer every morning
and night, and at every meal. Come Sun-
day,' said he, * they stop 'em, no go at all
that day, — keep still, — preach all day, —
first one, then another, just like church.
Oh, ver good men.' "

Here evidently comes a gap in the con-
versation. It is plain that the hermit of
Walden was not impressed by this improv-
ing example, or said something slighting,
and Joe Polls, ever a stout debater, sought
to strengthen his own argument for Sab-
bath-keeping by some unanswerable proof
of the goodness of these men. Ordinarily,
would Joe Polls have told the story that
follows ? He must have known many such,
but he never told another to Thoreau.
However, the proof of these men's piety

THE GRAY ROCK 107

being irrefutable, he brings it forth. " ^ One
day/ said he, ' going along a river, they
came to the body of a man in the water,
drowned good while, all ready fall to pieces.
They go right ashore, — stop there, go no
farther that day, — they have meeting there,
preach and pray just like Sunday. Then
they get poles and lift up the body, and
they go back and carry the body with them.
Oh, they ver good men.' " Not a very cor-
rect account of what happened, as we shall
see, but what Joe Polis thought he had
heard from John Franceway,' who was
there. The two Indians had agreed that to
give Christian burial to this man was a sure
proof of goodness.

But is the poet-naturalist impressed with
the beauty of this act of piety to the un-
known dead, the mere body of corruption
now, but once a man, —

Cut off even in the blossoms of his sin,
Unhousel'd, disappointed, unanel'd" ?

" I judged," said he, " from this account
that their every camp was a camp-meeting,

^ Francois, of course, but called Franceway when it
was not made into Plassoway, Brassway, or Brassua.

io8 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

and they had mistaken their route, — they
should have gone to Eastham ; that they
wanted an opportunity to preach more
than to see Ktaadn. I read of a similar
party that seem to have spent their time
there singing the songs of Zion. I was
glad that I did not go to that mountain
with such slow coaches."

The reverse of the shield presents a very
different picture.

The only one of this party whom I have
known personally was, at the time of this
little woods excursion in 1857, already
something of a veteran in adventure. He
had hunted big game on the coast of Africa
and pirates in the China seas ; he had been
harried and almost annihilated by such a
typhoon as comes but twice in a century,
and he was one of those who, with Commo-
dore Perry, turned a leaf of destiny by ran-
ging Japan with the nations of the West.'

By his friendly courtesy, I have under
my hand an unpublished autograph ac-

I Professor John S. Sewall of the Bangor Theological
Seminary.

THE GRAY ROCK 109

count of this trip, written before Mr. Tho-
reau had ever set pen to paper upon his
own record. Such a vivacious little nar-
rative as it is, effervescing with puns and
bright word-play, turning all the hardships
of a toilsome cruise into the most laugh-
able of adventures. Not even Theodore
Winthrop's boyish account of his trip down
the West Branch touches the fun and frolic
of these psalm-singing ministers.

There were eighteen in the party, — ten
theological students, two friends of theirs,
and six boatmen, with three batteaus.
They made the trip from Bangor to the
top of Katahdin and back in ten days, com-
ing from the summit of Katahdin into
Bangor in just three days, which must be
very near a record, there being no railroad
then above Oldtown. It was an uncom-
monly rainy year, and they suffered tor-
tures from black flies and mosquitoes. The
bulk of their food was hard-tack and dried
herring. They made forced marches, and
had totally insufficient tent-room. But
there is not the suspicion of a complaint
all through this little history, not even that

no THE PENOBSCOT MAN

first night in a rainstorm, when eighteen
men are trying to decide how they are all
to sleep in a shelter tent but twenty feet
long, and the problems of stowage are so
great that one of the boatmen inquires
whether "the long ones will take the
tent lengthwise or crawl in twice." The
meagreness of their outfit they made up
for by the mock splendor of their titles,
being officially known as the Grand Mufti,
the Bivalvular Purveyor, the Drum Major,
Esculapius, and the Bashaw of Two Tails,
" who was no tale-bearer in spite of his
slanderous title, whose duty it was to keep
the stragglers up, to preserve the caudal ex-
tremity of the line in due proportions, and
bring the tour at last to a successful ter-
mination/' Upon the top of Katahdin the
Grand Mufti fell to calculating " how large
a constabulary would be required to put
down such a rising of the mass," and the
shivering Drum Major " broke out into
demi-semi-quavers all over ; in fact, his
music only made to achieve alternately a
^ shake ' and a ^rest/ " Thus it is all, ex-
cellent fooling, not a bit like the " road to

THE GRAY ROCK iii

Eastham." Mr. Thoreau need have had
no fears that he would not have been put
quite upon his mettle to keep up with either
the wit or the paces of this party.

In due place mention is made of that
Sunday spent in a camp of green boughs
just below the timber-line of Katahdin, —
" a Sabbath among the clouds, long to be
remembered as most like to the Sabbath
above the clouds. There were songs of
Zion — and meetings — even a sermon in
our gypsy camp. Had we climbed so far
toward heaven, yet not to get a glimpse of
the pearly gates ? . . . Katahdin was to
us as were the Delectable Mountains to
Christian and Hopeful, whence could be
seen with telescopic faith some of the glory
of the Celestial City." (One has the right
to meditate upon what one wills ; the curi-
ous may compare Mr. Thoreau's profitable
cogitations, when on the same spot, upon
Titans, Chaos, Vulcan, and Prometheus.)

Forty-seven years after that was written,
another member of the same party recalls
the day : —

" You remember the Sabbath we spent

112

THE PENOBSCOT MAN

upon Katahdin, the glorious outlook from
the mountain, the serious, but grotesque
appearance of our company as we joined
in the Sabbath services, Parker in his shirt-
sleeves and gloves, with mosquito netting
over his head, preaching the sermon, while
the rest of us, a number of whom have
gone to worship in a grander temple, were
recHning in positions which we would hardly
commend to the congregations whom we
have ministered to since in the House of
God.

" One of my pleasantest memories of that
Sabbath is of our boatmen, who seemed
the most interested participants in that
service, two of whom, I was told, not long
after were convertedand took a manly stand
for Christ, one of them joining the church
in Oldtown, and both dating the beginning
of their religious interest from that Sab-
bath and the way we kept it, so different
from any they had ever witnessed in that
region. All of our party on that trip have
seemed very near and dear to me, and not
the least precious to my memory are the
men who so kindly, and in such a bro-

THE GRAY ROCK 113

therly way, guided and cared for us. How
faithfully and nobly our Indian guide led
us ! Those rivermen are more serious and
thoughtful than they usually have credit
for. They are sharp and quick to read
character, especially to know who is inter-
ested in them, and no men, I believe, are
more faithful to a trust which has been
committed to them in confidence."

The records are full, but upon one point
there is not a word, and that is how they
found and buried the body of that dead
river-driver. Had not Thoreau recorded
it, I, who have inquired somewhat closely
into woods history ^nd for many years have
known the chronicler of the expedition,
though hearing often enough of the man
who was drowned at the Gray Rock of
Abol, might never have heard the sequel
to the story. The only public mention
any of the twelve seems ever to have made
of the incident was some time after Tho-
reau's thrust was published, when one of
the party printed a brief statement of the
facts in the " Congregationalist" for August
17,1866. He says: —

114 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

" The body which we found near the
head of Lake Pockwockamus was that of
a poor lumberman, drowned some four or
five weeks before, in driving logs. The
spot was so near the ground where we had
determined to halt for dinner, that we kept
on, dined, and then a party of volunteers
went back to perform the last rites of sepul-
ture. A rudely carved fragment of slate
was nailed to a tree at the head of the grave,
and served to tell the occasional hunter in
these trackless wilds of the disaster which
had befallen the sleeper beneath. A brief
prayer at the grave, with a few passages
from the Book of Books, was the simple
service which committed dust to dust.

"It was not because we were a party of
^ slow coaches ' that we halted for this act
of respect to the remains of a brother man.
The incident was certainly a sobering one;
and yet there was a degree of satisfaction in
being able to carry back to the friends the
tidings that the body of him whom they
mourned, and for whom they had twice
sent parties in search, had been found and
had received Christian burial."

THE GRAY ROCK 115

These are the documents on both sides,
for whose discrepancies in fact and feel-
ing the two Indians, Polis and Franceway,
are accountable. They are more than the
mere papers in a case. Here, on either
side, drawn up as if in review, are the two
parties to the difference, men with the best
that culture, learning, and philosophy could
give, yet neither seeing in the incident
anything deeply significant ; and between
them files this little column of woods-bred
men who read in it so much more, who
are so struck by its rarity and beauty that
they listen gladly to sermons and change
the current of their lives. They speak of
it to each other and, as it flies, the story
grows until what seems truth to Joseph
Polis is quite unlike the facts.

Deep impressions imply adequate causes:
what was sufficient so to impress Joe Po-
lis ? For he did not get his version of the
story from John Franceway. John knew
that only a part of his company went back
to bury this man. The chronicler, cross-
examined, says that he was washing dishes
for eighteen men ; others also were ab-

ii6 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

sent. John knew that they made no
unnecessary delay, for on that day, the
twenty-sixth of June, they covered the
whole distance from the foot of Ambajejus
Carry to the mouth of Abol Stream.
Doubtless he told Joe Polls this, and Joe,
knowing the country well, could not for-
get it. Only twenty-four days elapsed be-
tween the date of John Franceway's return
and the day upon which Thoreau wrote in
his journal, not time enough for a woods-
man to forget anything which had been
told him ; yet here is Joseph Polls, fully
convinced of its truth, telling Thoreau,
"in a low and solemn voice," that the
\yhole party stopped a full half day on
Pockwockamus Carry, about midway of
their actual day's journey, in order to do
honor to the grave of an unknown man,
and the implication is strong that the most
of this time was filled with religious ser-
vices on his behalf. No wonder that to
Thoreau it touched on the grotesque !

How is this to be accounted for ? Fraud
it is not ; it cannot be forgetfulness ; lack
of information is hardly possible ; it can-

THE GRAY ROCK

117

not be from a pious reverence for masses
for the dead — for Joe Polis v/as a Pro-
testant Indian.' It is sheer artistic instinct,
the human trait of wishing to inclose what
is uniquely excellent in the rarest and cost-
liest setting. Joseph Polis had improved
the story unconsciously.

Thoreau, who had come into the Maine
woods to study the Indian, might well
have taken time to probe this subtle mat-
ter, for here is something truly strange.
However, with his luckless knack of
blundering when he came in contact with
men, in his own phrase, he "improved his
opportunity to be ignorant." The most
significant incident that ever came under
his observation while he was in the Maine
woods he bungled utterly. Once, indeed,
he had been hot on the trail of a solution.
In camp at Kineo he had seen for the first
time a bit of phosphorescent wood, and
kindled by its cold fire, he writes four
pages about the phenomenon. " It sug-
gested to me that there was something to
be seen if one had eyes. It made a be-

I So he told Thoreau 5 but he died a Catholic.

ii8 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

liever of me more than before. I believed
that the woods were not tenantless, but
choke-full of honest spirits as good as my-
self any day.'' ' But in just two days from
that time Thoreau was shutting the mouth
of the man who could have told him all
he wanted to know. Joe Polis knew all
about the man who was drowned on the
Gray Rock of Abol ; Joe Polis could have
shown him all the spirits he wanted to
see!

Ah, the graves in the woods that one
who knows can tell of, lying singly, by
twos, by threes, by half-dozens ! This
One, That One, The Other, — then, as
recollection must travel back of the limits
of one man's life. Some One, Nobody-
Knows-Who, but it must have been a
grave, for the ground is springy and hol-
lowed, and about there is a line of mould
as if long back a fence of logs had guarded
a little space. So many of them ! and
every one doomed to be obliterated within

I Pp. 244-248, Maine Woods, New Riverside Edition.
The context is well worth looking up.

THE GRAY ROCK 119

the lifetime of the men who knew all about
them. That is what gets upon a man's
mind and gnaws it like a bone, the know-
ing that where he falls he will lie, like a
log in the forest, unburied or lost to recol-
lection. The quiet cemetery with white
palings and neat headstones ; the narrow,
orderly streets ; the heaped-up mounds
grown with grass ; the society of kindred
and acquaintance although in perpetual si-
lence, and the undisturbed possession of
even a narrow plot of earth come to him
in his visions with a desire as strong as
the longing for life itself. He knows how
it will be with him, — to be jammed in
the rapids under rocks, to float in some
dark eddy, to be cast out under the toss-
ing, creaking flowage of some lake, never
to be found, or to be buried by the path-
way, even so near that the passing will
soon go on over his head, and the men
who come after and curse the hollow in the
road that fills up with water will not know
that it is his grave. It was so with those
three buried at Howe Falls on Nahma-
kanta, where supplies were hauled over

120 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

the graves on purpose that the men might
not know and lose their courage. He re-
members at Pollywog Pond the eight
graves in one place, and one in another,
of those drowned on Nigger Pitch; two
at the mouth of Bean Brook ; seven at
Howe Falls Deadwater, of those who died
of smallpox, and six more at Logan Joe
Mary, dead of the same scourge. There
are all those who have died at Ripogenus,
and those down by Grand Falls, where
their names are scratched upon the rocks,
the only enduring memorial in all the
woods. How many he knows of here and
there, lying singly, unmarked, buried in
silence to wait in awful solitude. Every
grave is his own in possibility : he never
thinks of it slightingly. Death is still
Death in the woods, though outside now
it may be nothing but death.

Yet not even the solemnity of a death in
the wilderness explains why John France-
way and those other five, some of whom
knew this man and were near at hand when
he was drowned, regarded this incident
as so deeply solemn. For it was not the

THE GRAY ROCK

prayers and preaching upon the mountain,
it was something else that so impressed
them. Behind the stage on which they
were but players was the terrifying hell-fire
of Calvinism, Methodism, Wesleyanism,
mingling in contiguous incongruity with
the Romanist's purging flames ; and before
that lurid background they were all play-
ing in a drama of redemption and damna-
tion, not knowing when any one of them
was to leave the stage, nor what he was or-
dained to do upon it. But this man's part
was clear : he had played it out to damna-
tion, and made his exit, and no man might
deny that the doom was warrantable. It
was the tragic rightness of his fate, than
which the greatest of the playwrights have
conceived nothing more sternly just, that
conquered their imaginations.

For they knew the whole story ; they
had witnessed the man's sin and his prompt,
almost miraculous punishment ; and they
knew that his ghost cried unburied ; yet
now they saw him redeemed from the
damned into purgatorial hope, and, by a
special providence of God, given what no

122 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

man buried in those woods had ever had
before, the rites of Christian sepulture, —
a man who died under the curse of God,
by a just judgment ; who was lost irre-
coverably ; who was found at the last pos-
sible moment, his grave consecrated, his
spirit set at rest.

Moreover, because the Indian who saw
it chanced to tell another within three
weeks of his return, and because that one
by a still rarer chance told it to a man who
wrote everything down, even the things he
did not understand, the man who died for-
saken and alone has had the whole world
come to his obsequies. So far from being
placed obscurely in the wilderness, that
Gray Rock of Abol stands in the eyes and
sight of all.

These are strange stories, but they well
up out of the hearts of men, and in them
are the issues of Hfe. Men do not perish
alone, unknown, forsaken, forgotten. The
constitution of the universe forbids. The
truth about them must leap out some time,
and be written on the skies like the flashes
of the midnight Aurora ; somewhere it is

THE GRAY ROCK 123

to be known what they were, where they
failed, wherein they made their conquests,
— their treachery, their faithfulness — their
cowardice, their courage — their shameless-
ness, their honor — but most of all and
longest enduring, their better parts.

We come now to the story, no more
the facts about the story, but the story
itself.

There are many gray rocks on Abol :
Mount Katahdin put them there. Ka-
tahdin rules over all that West Branch
country, a calm despot. Mute, massive,
immense, hard-featured, broad-shouldered,
nowhere can you get in that country where
the broad forehead of Katahdin is not turned
upon you. Snow and rain it sends to that
region ; it floods the river from its flanks ;
its back cuts ofi^ the north wind, making the
valley hot ; the road of the farmer it has
closed, and the way of the lumberman it
makes unduly difficult, by sowing the whole
country with millions of tons of granite
chipped from its sides. From Abol all

124 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

the way down those many falls, Pockwock-
amus, Katepskonhegan, called more often
Debsconeag, Pescongamoc, which we now
call Passangamet, and Ambajejus, the river
in half a dozen places is choked with these
great granite boulders, quarried by the frost
from the sides of Katahdin,and by the ice
transported all over the country. Katah-
din makes all that region what it is ; it
made the falls, and, indirectly, the back-
breaking carries around them ; it made
the sand on Abol, the first place on the way
downstream where you notice clear sand
above freshet level ; it turned the course
of the glaciers and so directed the horse-
backs of the glacial drift ; it made the Nor-
way pines ' that grow on the horsebacks,
with their hearse-like plumes switching in
the breeze like stiff, rustling silk ; and it
made all the gray rocks. In this region
a "gray rock," or a "great gray," is the
accepted synonym for a boulder of Katah-
din granite.

Abol is the first fall upon which Katah- *

I Pinus resinosa, the red pine, wrongly called Nor-
way pine,"" says Gray, but here always so misnamed.

THE GRAY ROCK 125

din has laid a heavy finger/ being the
nearest to the mountain. It goes by many
names, according as the Indian has been
twisted into forms more or less easy for
the lumberman's tongue, — Aboljecarme-
guscook, Abolje^^rmegus, Aboljackne^d'-
sic, Aboljacko;;?d'gus, Aboljackarne^<^jsic,
— but it means just the same to say simply
Abol. The signification is not " smooth
ledge falls,*' as Thoreau gives it — that is
Sowadabscook, a hundred miles farther
down. The name means " place where the
water laughs in coming down," and be-
longs to two streams of crystal water, blue
as ice, that spring from the side of Katah-
din and enter the river just above the falls,
which by Indian custom take their name
from the stream.

The fall at Abol is nothing stupendous.
There is half a mile of very rough water,
but no sharp pitch. At the head, on the
right, lies a low, sandy island overgrown

I Not to be construed as meaning that there is no gran-
ite above this point. Loose granite appears on the lower
end of Ripogenus, and ledge granite not far below, but
the drift boulders are not aggressively conspicuous till near
to Abol.

126 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

with inferior brushwood, and, like the rest
of the carry, bearing a few scattered Nor-
way pines. The passage behind it is closed
by a wing dam, making a dry way ; one
might go upon the island without thinking
that it had ever been parted from the shore.

Here by the head of the island are the
gray rocks of Abol. They lie close to the
water, at some stages under it, great slabs
of granite, as true as if split out by the
hand of man. Most of them are from fif-
teen to eighteen feet long, about four and
a half feet deep, and of a thickness varying
from that of a thin slab of nine or ten
inches to one of two and a half feet mean
width. Several lie parallel, their fractures
curving coincidently, showing that they
have been split since they arrived. All are
large, but one ranks all the others. It is
thirty-six and a half feet long, five feet and
ten inches at its widest point, and four feet
and nine inches at its greatest thickness,
with mean dimensions not very consider-
ably less, perfect in shape, the most tre-
mendous natural obelisk anywhere to be
found. These are the gray rocks of Abol,

THE GRAY ROCK 127

rifted out of the side of old Katahdin,
which crouches lion-Hke only six miles off,
watching them as the Sphinx watches the
little shrine between his paws, looking out
over the desolation of the wilderness.

When the water is at its height, most
of these slabs are submerged, but there is
one rock that is always above the surface.
This is the one that has a name. Old men
sometimes call it the Goodwin Rock, but
those who are younger and those who
came before, for fifty, sixty, perhaps al-
most a hundred years, have known it as
the Gray Rock of Abol. Standing where
it does, within the suck of the current,
though so near inshore, — for the current
draws upon the head of the island, — a
man is always stationed upon it when the
logs are running, to prevent jams from
forming. There is not the slightest danger
in working upon the Gray Rock. It is
about three feet out of water at driving-
pitch, dry always ; it is close inshore ; the
water is not yet rough, only strong; and
it is the coarse granite from Katahdin, upon
which a man's foot cannot slip. There is

128 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

no danger at all upon the Gray Rock, no
more than upon a ball-room floor.

But now it is almost fifty years since
Goodwin of Stetson found that rock his
doom. Of a May morning, too, when the
little wintergreen sprouts, tender and red,
were coming up on the cradle-knolls, and
the bees were in the blueberry blooms,
and here and there a wild woods-straw-
berry, blossoming white, made the drivers
think of home. There was such a bright
stillness on the morning, and Katahdin,
the old giant, still snow^-capped, looked
down benignly, as if he had waked up
good-natured, and, throwing off his blan-
ket of clouds, had put up his head before
doffing his nightcap. " Good-morning to
you ! " he called out to the river-drivers
working on the foaming river a full mile
below his crown. They waved him back
a salute. They yelled as they worked. It
was great fun to work on such a clean,
crisp morning, and as they felt the strength
of the current and rode down to the head
of the falls, balancing on a single log, they
yelled at Goodwin on the Gray Rock.

THE GRAY ROCK 129

That was not Goodwin's day to be
merry. Something had gone wrong with
him, and he stood on that gray granite
from the mist-time of early morning till
luncheon-time, when they lost him, a
sombre figure wrapped in sullen thoughts,
lunging spitefully with his pick-pole at
every log, however innocent of evil inten-
tions of jamming, that ran out a blunt nose
by his rock just to have a look at him.
Whenever they came near him, the poor
dumb logs, he prodded them viciously
with his pick-pole, and drove them off
into the slick of the current and cursed
them for their stupidity. Not even the
brightness of the morning beguiled him
from his evil humor. No man knew what
the matter was. He did not have a bad
name, his mates spoke well of him ; it
might have been homesickness; it might
have been the toothache ; it might have
been the wave of world-woe that surges
over a man now and then from depths he
cannot sound ; but there he stood, all
alone on the gray granite, stretching out
his fist in wanton perversity of spirit, and

130 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

with blackening oaths cursed God Al-
mighty, damning God to God's own face
in the wilderness all alone.

" There ain't no sense in talkin' that
way/' said one man to another in disap-
proval as they rode down past on their
logs.

"It's darin' too much, even in a safe
place like he 's in, it is," replied the other,
riding his log right into the white of the
rapid ; " I would n't do it, not here, not
for no money."

Still the man on the shore station cursed,
swore, damned with imprecations every-
thing that came near him, and no one
knew, no one ever knew, what was the
trouble with him.

For he disappeared. He was in a safe
place, and he fell off. He was in quiet
water, strong, not bad, and he did not
reach the shore. He was a good swimmer,
but he never struck out. One man saw
above the slope of the current downstream
of the rock, a pair of hands reaching up
toward heaven, — just a pair of hands,
never anything more.

THE GRAY ROCK 131

The man who had seen this told the
others. " 1 seen him stand there like he
was on a barn floor, and I seen him lift up
his fist an' shake it -right stret in the face
of old Katahdin, an' I hearn him holler
like his voice would rattle lead inside him,
' To hell with God ! ' An' then when I
looked the Gray Rock was all empty, an'
in the water I seen only his two sets of fin-
gers movin' slow-like in the mist that sticks
close to the black slick of the falls. I seen
'em open once, an' then they shut an' was
gone."

" That was a judgment," said the men
one to another.

" That was sure a judgment for swear-
in'," they answered solemnly, continuing
their search for his body.

But the body was not to be found.

" And it ain't to be expected it ever will
be. It ain't often that you do find 'em
when they dies so by a judgment," said one
of the wise ones who could remember much
that had happened on the river. " Lucky
for you fellows if everything keeps quiet
around here. I 'm glad I 'm goin' right

132 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

along with the head of the drive and shan't
have to camp none on this carry."

The man next to him — who was to
stay — looked at him a Httle startled —
and kept silent.

It was as they had predicted, nothing
was ever found of the man, though two
parties were sent up on purpose to search
after the drive had passed down. " He left
a mother/' as the phrase is, which means
in woods talk that he was the only son of
a widow, and for his mother's sake all was
done that could be. But the search was
fruitless.

" I knew it would be just that way,"
said the wise one ; " it 's always so with
judgments; that 's a part of it — they can't
never be quiet till they are buried, and
they don't never get buried, not that kind,
when they die damning God that way."

What of the weeks that followed in the
desolation of the wilderness ? * The little
flowers sprouted leaves and buds, and the
buds grew to blossoms; the pine pollen
drifted down in golden showers, and the

THE GRAY ROCK 133

tree swallow built her nest. Everything
alive was happy and moving. There was
no foot of man, however, on those carries.
Showers fell and the damp they left dried
up, and never a human foot-track was im-
printed upon the softened soil. But round
about the rocks of Abol, under the pines
on the carry, those tall and funereal Nor-
ways, what was it that wailed and cried ?

Crushed by the waves upon the crag was I,

Who still must hear these waves among the dead.

Breaking and brawling on the promontory.
Sleepless ; and sleepless is my weary head!

Nor Death that lulleth all, can lull my ghost.
One sleepless soul among the souls that sleep ! ' '

" And I would n't not want to camp on
that carry, not now," says the hunter; " for
mebbe I should be for seein' things."

Your guide is not superstitious. Ask
him if he believes in ghosts, and he will
look straight through and beyond you.
" No," says he, as short and sharp as a
rifle-crack.

But then your guide knows many things

134 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

which it is not to be expected that he will
impart to you. When the wind sobs out-
side and the rain is on the roof, the fall
rain that brings down the withered leaves,
and you sit by the fire listening to the
wailing wind, then will be the time you
choose to talk to him of things you know
yourself. It was your father's cousin who
had warning when his friend's ship went
down in the China seas ; the day and the
hour he knew. Did his friend not appear
at his bedside at the edge of dawn, his hat
crushed down over his eyes and a gray
ship's blanket drawn around his shoulders,
just as he had sprung up the companion-
way when the ship reeled under her last
blow and foundered ? It was two days after
they had cleared from Hong Kong, and he
always knew what he saw. Your uncle, he
had seen things too. Once, when he was
sitting in his cabin in mid-ocean, in the calm
of evening, a woman passed through the
room wringing her hands, and she passed
through again and wrung her hands, and a
third time, still wringing her hands, and he
never knew what it meant, only he saw it.

THE GRAY ROCK 135

" And it 's lucky he did n't ask her no
questions/' says the guide, speaking up
promptly ; " for any one that talks to a
ghost, they don't Hve the year out, they
don't live long mostly. I knowed a man
— and it was my father — he was follered
by a ghost, and she spoke. She asked
him for a cup of salt he had borrered, and
he said he 'd pay it back, and he did, but he
did n't live long after that."

Your guide is not superstitious, but he
has seen some strange things. He knows,
for one, that murdered men and suicides
and men who have died under a judgment
are never easy till something is done for
them. "If a man kills himself, his ghost
is bound to stay around the place he did
it *s long 's the house is there; there was
Frank Black killed himself in a camp up
by Grant Farm, year the war broke out, and
they did n't have no peace nor quiet long
as them camps stayed. And if a man is
murdered, he will stay round till his body
is found ; if you want to know for sure,
there 's the way Dudley Maxfield's ghost
ha'nts round that poke-logan hole up to

136 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

Ayers's Rips. But if a man dies under a
judgment, then they don't never find his
body, not at all, and that was how it was
with Larry Connors."

Up and down that carry at Abol all that
month and the next ranged the spirit of
the man who was drowned at the Gray
Rock. That is the name he has come to
be known by, not his own, but as " the
man who was drowned at the Gray Rock
of Abol."

In the rain beneath the Norways, in the
moonlight by the sandy carry-end, he
paced till cock-crow. The nights were
short then, but he paced till daybreak. In
the cloud of the falls-mist he wandered,
more impalpable than that, searching among
the rocks for his former habitation. When
he had found it, down along the tangled
shores of the deadwater below Abol, he
traveled, slowly, each night a trifling jour-
ney, following what he must not lose sight
of, desiring infinitely the burial which was
to be denied him.
"To have no peace in the grave, is that not sad ?"

Shorter still grew the nights, yet longer

THE GRAY ROCK 137

grew his journeyings, for the stream be-
came stronger and talked louder, and threw
up spray and beat among the rocks of the
ragged Pockwockamus. It is a rough and
terrible journey down among those rocks,
and the lost soul might well have shud-
dered as he saw what happened to the
tenantless and battered body, useless, yet
still so precious, which he was following.
On the shortest night of the year, it came
safely out of the current of the deadwater
into an eddy some distance below the fall.

It was, and doubtless still is, a pretty
spot, with tall trees overarching and a
sandy shore, so quiet and beautiful, and
yet not far above are the great gray rocks
and the thunder of the falls. There by the
moonlight, upon the sandy shore, all night
long and many nights paced the tortured
spirit. The current does not move that
eddy, — and the sun beats down upon it,

— and the days of grace are numbered,

— and no one comes.

Then the woods resound with singing.
All up and down the river the shores

138 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

reverberate, and Katahdin smiles grimly,
his head bare and bald now to the summer
sun, to see the joyous troop that comes
along. What jokes they make, what mer-
riment on the hot, hard carries, what a
pace they travel at ! The woods at that day
had never seen such a throng of pleasure-
seekers. Eighteen men of them, and all
singing !

But the guides were thoughtful at times,
and sometimes they looked at one another
or passed a quiet word. It had begun at
Ambajejus that morning, when one boat-
man slyly nudged another and asked pri-
vately, " Where '11 we be campin' down
to-night ? "

" Head of Pockwockamus most likely,"
was the answer. " It 's a strong pull from
there to the top of the mountain in one
day, but seein' they want to camp on
top, that 's the easiest thing to do. We 'd
better save our backs on these carries what
we can to-day, and take it out of our legs
to-morrow."

" You can count me out on that Pock-
wockamus bough-down," said the first, and

THE GRAY ROCK 139

he made a pretext of looking at the pitch
on the boats to draw the other away with
him out of ear-shot of the rest. " Think
a minit/' he said ; " where do you s'pect
that that Gooding has got to ? You can
just bet your money that it 's no bone to
camp downstream of himr

" It ought to be all right with ten min-
isters along to keep the boogers off/' de-
murred the first ; " and it 's too hard a
trip to try to make all these carries in one
day, with three boats and only six of us
fit to lug boat. It 's two miles of solid
carry, and that makes 'most six miles of
lugging boat, too much for one day, and
it 's most as hard poling up over them
rocky hell-holes ; and then that dratted
old mountain to-morrow. Tell you, flesh
and blood has some rights, I guess, as well
as dead folks ! "

" You '11 find me campin' just upstream
of Abol when you come to hunt me up
to-mor' morninV' said the first quietly.

" Oh, they don't do folks no hurt that
ever I heerd of," remarked the other.

" Well, I seen him alive mebbe last of

140 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

any one, and I ain't a-goin' to take no risks.
I ain't lost no ghosts, an' I don't want
nobody's else's huntin' me up an' bein'
sociable. What 's to hender droppin' some
of our boats along ? We can leave the little
wangan-boat right here at the foot of Am-
bajejus, and drop one of the big ones at
the foot of Pockwockamus, and let them
fellers farm it from there up. That makes
only one boat on the last two carries, an'
two on Debsconeag an' this, and saves a
whole barrel of backaches. Tip the wink
to John an' we '11 do it."

" Think them fellers will suspicion any-
thing ? " asked the other.

"Them? " retorted the other. "They '11
be blind as bats that has lost their spetta-
cles ; lots of things left for them to I'arn
arter they get 'em all booked up down
to the Institootion ! This ain't no place
for us to be stoppin' to eddicate them^ 'less
we show 'em how to ride shank's mare on
these blasted carries."

The plan was adopted ; the boatmen
breathed more freely. It was just at dinner-
time, a quarter of a mile below the foot of

THE GRAY ROCK 141

Pockwockamus Carry, where the beach is
sandy and the water shoals inshore, that
they came upon the body of the man who
for five weeks had been missing.

There they gave him Christian burial,
close by the water, very close, as it had
to be, and yet above the line of the fresh-
ets. " Two of our boatmen knew him,"
writes he who headed the burial party,"
" and spoke very kindly and feelingly
of him. The body was much swollen, and
so decomposed that we could only dig a
shallow grave in the sand close beside it,
which the boatmen made with their pad-
dles. The men gently and reverently lifted
the body into its resting-place ; we had a
funeral service ; one of the men covered
the remains with sheets of birch bark
which he cut from a tree, and we all seemed
to be brothers united by more than any
earthly tie, as we proceeded on in our
journey."

For the first time ever known within
these woods, a man had received Christian
burial.

' The Rev. F. P. Chapin of Hudson, N. H.

142 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

The boatmen did not talk much about
it then. It was not till they were camped
by the mouth of the lower Abol, the fire
blazing and supper eaten, that two of them,
by a common inclination, wandered off to
the shore of the clear stream and sat there
in the sunset afterglow, which turned Ka-
tahdin to a purple amethyst and flushed
the water pink beyond the dark reflection
of the further bank.

They sat silent. One had a bit of hard-
tack, and he crumbled it slowly to toss to
the fishes, watching the lunges that the
white chevin, ever active at twilight, made
for the flakes as they settled.

" Them 's awful spry fish, them chubs,"
said he, as if natural history were all that
weighed upon his mind ; " I Ve seen 'em
'fore now peel a raw potato all white just
jumpin' at it that way, s' sharp in their
jaws. And the' 's eels, too, they 're all for
— they 're i^ady' said he, suddenly check-
ing himself. " You seen how it was to-
day ? Tou understood? "

The other shook his shoulders, but did
not reply.

THE GRAY ROCK 143

The one who found a relief in words
went on. " One minister is enough to
do the job for most of us ; he ought n't
to be so very bad off with ten of 'em —
think so ? "

" Guess he needed most of 'em," re-
sponded the other, not too hopeful.

" But don't ye think that 'mongst 'em
they could menege to git him his ^ Come-
all-yer'? " It was a free woods rendering
of the Scripture invitation, " Come unto
me, all ye that labor, and are heavy laden,
and I will give you rest."

"Well," he went on, not insisting on
an answer, " it was an awful lucky thing
for him that they chanceted to come along
just now, for he could n't have fleeted
much longer. No one can't say that Fri-
day wa'n't no lucky day for him."

The other did not speak. The silence
suited him. He sat with his hands around
his knees, looking at the red glow of the
evening sky and the twinkling evening
star. " Say," said he at length, " how hot
do you s'pose hell is anyhow ? "

The next day was Saturday and they

144 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

climbed the mountain. By the next this
man was ripe to listen to sermons, and it
is reported that they did him no harm.

The next day they all came flying down
and pushed far along on their road to the
settlements. On the way they paused. It
was by the grave of the man whom they
had buried. One of them — it was Chapin,
who had headed the burial party — brought
forth a piece of slate that he had with him
and nailed it to the tree at the head of the
grave. It said only : —

George Goodwin, June 26, 1857.

More they did not know, neither age, nor
home, nor the day he died.

It was almost certainly Sunday labor by
which that rude inscription was scratched
with a jack-knife upon the bit of slate, —
found upon the granite side of Katahdin
where slate is rare, and carefully treasured
under many difficulties against this use, —
but it was labor to be justified by the strict-
est Pharisee. Never again would they have
opportunity to mark that lonely grave
with any sign that it was consecrated

THE GRAY ROCK 145

ground. So they nailed it to the tree at
the head of the sleeper, who did not stir,
nor moan, nor attempt to talk to them,
and they left him there to sleep until the
Judgment.

Tree and tablet are both gone now, I
am told ; a simple post marks the place,
just opposite the head of the second island
in Pockwockamus Deadwater, on the right
shore, directly across from Ben Harris's
camp. An Indian guide tells me that he
now and then clears out about it to keep
the forest from encroaching, and after his
day some one else will take up the task.
It is consecrated ground, the only hallowed
spot in all that limitless forest. There,
two rods from the water, three at most,
close by the place where they found him,
still rest the bones of the man who was
drowned on the Gray Rock of Abol and,
by a miracle of God, after death found
mercy.

VI

A CLUMP OF POSIES

A CLUMP OF POSIES

I NEVER met the lady face to face, and none
of the men ever told me whether they
thought her plain or pretty, though they
gave out that she was " all right,'' and that
they were Amici usque ad araSy or its woods
equivalent. However, there can be ho
question about the truth of the story : for
we were in the woods that year and had
the same guide, Wilbur Webster, who was
drowned that winter in the lake behind
Kineo. Were he alive, he would vouch for
all I say ; but I heard enough of it from
others. On the whole it is a pretty story.

Down on Ripogenus, where the little
knoll springs in the road to give you a view
over the treetops of that rounded moun-
tain with the shining patches of ledge near
its summit, from which all hunters long
have called it the Squaw's Bosom, — just
about halfway across the carry, a natural

150 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

resting-place, and delightful withal because
it is so cosy and yet so open, is the Put-
ting-in Place, where in spring the river-
drivers launch their boats for the adventur-
ous passage of the other mile and a half
of Ripogenus. It is delightful there in
springtime, hedged with birches, carpeted
with bracken, murmuring with the hum
of bees and of the rushing river many rods
below.

There the batteaus are laid out bottom
up ; there the fire smokes under the sear-
ing-irons and the keg of pitch is kept hot,
while the old batteau-pitcher, deft and wise
at his trade, goes over the sides and bot-
tom of each one, and daubs and smears and
sears with his irons until he has made ready
each boat for her ordeal by water, soon to
be undergone. Here he sings to himself
and smokes, runs his left hand lightly but
searchingly over the smooth surface, scan-
ning it with close-bent head, before he lifts
himself with hands on hips to straighten
his bowed back. He is an old man, used
to the River ; he likes his calling, but he
does not meddle much with young and little

POSIES

things, either to notice or to molest. The
brown hare thumps up and sniffs at him
and thumps off again ; the vireos and red-
starts carol to him without his hearing; and
the little flowers grow bravely, unpicked
and perhaps unseen. Even the coy lady's-
slipper," that wanton, wayward flower, who
spreads her skirts and flutters her ribbons,
curtsying and coquetting, playing fast-and-
loose with all her lovers ; who hides herself
in the forest and turns invisible and every
year seeks a new home, — even she did
not try to fascinate the old man by her
capriciousness, but grew boldly out in the
sunshine, in a great clump, as thickset as a
garden plant, and almost within the cart-
track of the carry road. These, however,
were the demurest little flowers, not blush-
ing pinkish like their coquettish sisters, but
immaculately white and as staid as Quaker-
esses ; they raised their eleven little heads
— a very large family for their tribe — and
lifted their great waxen lips and spread
their fluttering pennons in purest inno-

" Cypripedium acaule, the stemless lady' s-slipper, our
only common species here.

152 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

cence and childlikeness. There was never
a prettier bunch of lady's-slippers, and yet
of the almost two hundred men who passed
there several times a day, not one seemed
to have any more eyes than the old batteau-
pitcher, not one had ever given them the
compliment of a glance. It took some-
thing very like a miracle to make those men
see what one would have supposed that
they could not help seeing ; for the little
clump of posies is the beginning and the
middle and the ending of this story.

A miracle is, literally, something which
excites astonishment. The cause may be
decried as commonplace, but there was
certainly no deficiency in the effect when
the men came dragging in at dusk from
their outposts to the camp at the upper
end of Ripogenus, and found a new tent
there pitched right among their own, and
in it a Woman.

"Well, that does beat all hell!" was
their frank comment, and there followed
interrogations very much to the point, in
satisfaction of which those who were lucky

POSIES

153

enough to have been at the upper end
of the carry that afternoon, and therefore
possessed of the news, announced that
though she wa'n't quite a pullet, she wa'n't
no old hen neither.

" Schoolma 'am

" Naw ! Not a bittee ! "

" Glasses an' short hair ? "

" Naw ! " (more viciously). " All right,
I tell ye, all right, an' Wilbur Webster
backs the deal. Friends of Joe Francis's
an' Steve's, an' come up the Lake' with the
Old Man, who 's comin' down to-morrer.
Stands to the West Branch Drive to do
the pretty thing by 'em."

Up in the carpenter shop, which was
built on an extravagant scale, with the sky
for a roof and the whole earth for a floor,
and nothing else in it but a litter of shav-
ings and a tall horse for making poles and
peavey handles, some of the older men
discussed the incident without approval.

The grumbler, who was not young,
swore about the folly of bringing a woman
on the drive where men had to work and

I "The Lake'' always meant Moosehead.

154 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

did n't want to be side-stepping, and where
they mebbe might Hke to talk some to
their blame selves all on the quiet when
the blank logs was contrairy, 'thout havin'
to stop and think who was by.

One of the others suggested that at the
worst she could n't be everywhere to once,
— which was axiomatic, — and as there was
a hunderd an' seventy-five of them against
her alone, they could gamble on at least a
hunderd and seventy-four chances in their
favor, which was long odds.

Still the grumbler allowed that it was
rank inconsiderate to come their way at
all ; that the drive wa'n't no place for a
woman anyways, and folks that knowed
when they was well oflF stayed to home
and let men work ; and if the women took
to comin' there so thick, they 'd be just
'bliged to leave the logs in the woods to
rot all by their blank selves. He was right,
too. Tourists have no more business on
the drive than Sunday-school picnics have
between firing-lines, and if anything un-
pleasant happens, they may blame them-
selves.

POSIES

155

There was no rejoicing among the old
men over the advent of a woman. Down
the hill, in the two long rows of open-
fronted tents, with the fires between, the
younger fellows also sat in gloom. It did
seem a little homey, perhaps, to have a
girl around, especially to know that there
was a nice girl around, whom one could
look at without speaking to, and who would
be as much above the reek of their daily
life as if living on the top of Katahdin.
(She had on a red dress? Well, just like
a red-bird in a glass case, to be looked at
respectfully without touching.) Ripogenus
was hard enough to get logs and boats
over ; and the life was monotonous in
spite of its dangers. This would be some-
thing different, something like going to
church, thought one or two. Maybe she
might speak to some of them, to a few of
them, to one or two of them anyway.

Then they looked across the fire at the
fellows on the other side of it. And they
saw themselves ! Such a set of tatterde-
malions never graced a corn-field. They
looked from man to man and saw hardly

156 the; PENOBSCOT MAN.

a whole garment apiece. They saw rags,
and they saw holes, and they saw scriptural
patches of new cloth upon old garments,
producing the prophesied rents. There
were men with trousers abbreviated to a
sort of trunks, or cut off just below the
knee to prevent " calking," and some sen-
sitive souls, who abhorred setness of de-
sign, wore their nether garments with one
leg cut below and the other above the knee.
There were some without coat, vest, or
trousers, or any part of them, but attired in
full suits of underwear. This economical
and attractive costume, sometimes white,
but oftener originally a vivid scarlet, re-
duced by rains and perspiration to a whit-
ish red, once whole perhaps, but now
pinned together with huge horse safety-
pins and variously adorned with patches
of old mittens, was an ultra style which
would have attracted attention in the most
exclusive circles. There were men in rigs
in which they would not have let their own
mothers see them, and men who, tired and
hungry as they were, would not have
come down the carry-path till after dark.

POSIES

157

had they known beforehand that there
was a woman on the carry. Oh, the dove-
cote of the West Branch Drive got flut-
tered that time !

But what cause had they to look for
such a calamity ? It was thunder out of a
clear sky, — everything all right in the
morning when they left, and then the
thunderbolt ! No human foresight could
have warded off^ the stroke, for never
within the memory of the oldest man, not
of the log-marker, nor the carpenter, nor
fhe batteau-pitcher, not of the men who
had almost outlived their usefulness, had
there ever been a woman on the drive.

" And to have my broadcloth suit to
home ! lamented one of the most out at
elbows, breaking the gloom.

" And that Chinyman ain't sent back
my shiny collars yet this week," said an-
other, the joke being that there was not
a Celestial within a hundred miles as the
crow flew, nor a starched collar within two
days' woods journey.

" Well, you 'd ort to see me in my pay-
tent leathers and high dickey and ram-

158 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

beaver/' put in a third; "I reckon I 'm just
scrum when I do get fixed up ; but it hain't
no use ; this here toney underwear that
I 'm a-sportin' is too far ahead o' the spring
styles for this northern climate ; makes me
look like a last year's bird's nest."

" I count a old swamp robin's nest ' a
heap tidier lookin' set o' tatters 'n them
clo'es what you have on. Bill. It don't
look quite so all fallin' to pieces ; but the
wangan bills on this drive 's goin' to be
somethin' hijjus. I was hopesin' to come
out with a dollar or two to the good, time
we got into boom, but I guess I sh'll blow
it all in for wangan, and come out in the
Comp'ny's debt same 's ush'al."

The man next to him was looking at his
feet stretched out to the fire. There were
neither heels nor toes to the socks he had
on, but still he accounted them presenta-
ble ; anything is that has an inch or two
of the top left.

I "Swamp robin" is the vernacular name for the
hermit thrush and also for the olive-backed, the two not
being distinguished by woodsmen ; but as the former
nests on the ground, this man must have meant the olive-
backed thrush's or even the catbird's nest.

POSIES

159

" Guess I sh'll hev to give 'em their
time, boys; they '11 do for patches anyhow.
If there was more pairs of 'em, it would be
easier to shingle 'em on over the wust o'
the holes. Say, can't I swap my jack-knife
for a pair of old mittens ? "

Thereupon the price of old mittens and
stockings went up by jumps, till the mar-
ket in worn-out socks was the firmest ever
known on the drive. No danger of its
being suddenly beared by some one with a
reserve of foot and hand gear. That year
there was n't a cast-off garment left upon
the end of the carry, and every one knows
that usually the path of the drive is littered
with old clothes and old shoes. The de-
mand for thread and needles was lively
also, and had any one been playing Peep-
ing Polly that night, long after their usual
hour for turning in, the West Branch Drive
might have been seen bending over their
work, patching by firelight, in weariness
of soul, but with the honest intention of
being presentable on the morrow.

But when they got a chance at the wan-
gan chest and could endow themselves in

i6o THE PENOBSCOT MAN

its glories, what a brave array of aniline
they did present ! Even Solomon might
have studied their attire to the profitable
neglect of the lily of the field. To attempt
to describe the styles at Ripogenus that
year would beggar the describer. Full suits
of underwear went out of fashion with
a bound, and a kaleidoscope of cut and
color followed, — red, blue, green, yel-
low, stripes, plaids, patches. The Girl had
known a little of the rainbow attractions
of Epstein's and of Pretto's, but such
cheerful combinations of color were wholly
new ; she wondered where is the Zeit-
geist's shop and the roaring loom which
wove such clothes. Some no doubt they
brought into the woods with them ; some
they purchased from the wangan chest;
but some must have come straight from
Tom a Bedlam's. It would have turned
the head of any girl who thought that so
much was done on her account. This one
never dreamed of that, — I have thought
since then that she was rather stupid, for
a girl. She was pleased with the fantastic
costumes and with their picturesqueness

POSIES

i6i

against the green background, she found
O'Connor a good comrade, and she for-
got that she was either part of the show
herself — or the sole spectator. Least of
all did she imagine that she and the gen-
tlemen of the extraordinary clothes were
taking parts in a little comedy of courtesy,
chivalry, and sentiment as pretty as it was
light. Something of it she perceived while
she was with them ; a part she did not
learn till after she had left them ; and the
prettiest part of all she would never have
known anything .about, had not the clump
of posies at the Putting-in Place stopped
her to tell a dolorous tale.

When the Girl went up to visit O'Con-
nor on the drive, it was in the face of
some friendly expostulation. O'Connor is
known to be a noisy lad, and quiet folk
are sometimes aghast at his perform-
ances.

You could hear him when he started from the Rapo-
genus Chutes,
You could hear the cronching-cranching of his swashing,
spike-sole boots.

i62 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

You could even hear the colors in the flannel shirt he
wore.

And the forest fairly shivered at the v^ay O'Connor
swore.

'Twas averred that in the city, full a hundred miles
av^ay.

They felt a Httle tremor when O'Connor drew his pay.

O'Connor reached the city and he reached it with
ajar.

He had piled up all the cushions in the centre of the
car.

— Had set them all on fire, and around the blazing
pile

He was dancing * dingle breakdowns ' in a very jovial
style.

And before they got him cornered they had rung in
three alarms.

And it took the whole department to tie his legs and
arms." '

Of course the drive is not all O'Connor ;
no one estimates, at the highest figure, that
it will yield more than nine hundred and
twenty-five one thousandths pure O'Con-
nor, the remainder being an alloy of the
virtues. Even Bangor is philistine to this

' O'Connor from the Drive," in Mr. Holman F.
Day's Pine Tree Ballads,

POSIES

163

extent ; for the wisdom of Bangor about
woodsmen is largely the fruit plucked from
the tree of police-court knowledge. So
Bangor had said, and said seriously : " Why
do you take your daughter up there? How
dare you do it — among all those rough
men ? Do you really think it is — ? " But
he thought it was. Bangor does not real-
ize that, next to his courage, what most
distinguishes O'Connor is his respectful
behavior to women. He may be drunk, but
he is never insolent to a lady, never affronts
her by look or comment, never makes it
unpleasant for her to pass through the
streets that he frequents.

When in the woods and lacking all the
temptations which make city life so briefly
but uproariously happy, O'Connor shows
his more attractive side, and the Girl was
pleased to see how charming it was. The
men on that drive were probably not se-
lected for their good clothes or their supe-
rior morals, but with an eye solely to their
ability to get the logs along. They were
officially classified as "white men. Irish-
men, Province men, Bluenoses, Prince

i64 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

Edward Islanders/ Canadian French, St.
Francis, Micmac, Penobscot, and Passa-
maquoddy Indians ; " but among all this
mixed crew, in almost a week of familiar
intercourse, not a man failed to be honest,
orderly, and civil. Not a man was heard
to swear, and the only impropriety of any
sort was unwitting, and was promptly re-
buked by several who could see, what the
speaker did not, that it must be overheard.
Boxes of camera plates, which would have
been unbribable tell-tales to any meddling
with the tent during long hours of absence,
showed that not even an innocent curios-
ity ever went so far as to look at what was
left in their keeping. In all ways they
proved their good-will.

The Girl was charmed with other evi-
dences of their kindliness. They were
kind always to their great horses, which
that year for the first time were used to
draw the boats across the carry. The
squirrels frisked about the wangan tents
almost within arm's length of the cook.

' The last three were called P. I.'s, though, strictly
speaking, a P. I. is a Prince Edward Islander.

POSIES

165

The little birds were tame and numerous.
The wild hares seemed to know no fear.
One day the men found a fawn too young
to walk. They petted and talked to it,
brought it out to be seen, and then care-
fully left it where the mother would find
it again. A hermit thrush had built a nest
close beside the carry road, within the
camp-ground limits. She had selected that
spot before she knew that men and horses
and dynamite and millions of logs, thun-
dering down over the falls, were to shake
the earth itself and break the sylvan still-
ness. She had not dreamed that twenty-six
great boats, drawn by heavy-footed horses,
clanking stout harness and straining at the
sledge whose runners clung to the bare
earth, were to be dragged past her little
house under the broken cherry-sprout
overarched with last year's bracken. Yet
she stoutly held her ground and stayed
upon her eggs, though only a rod away
passed the bustle of the drive. The nest
was pointed out to the men that they might
not accidentally crush it, and often they
would stand in the road and watch the little

i66 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

bright-eyed mother, but not one of them
ever startled her in order to see the eggs.
When they were all gone and the carry was
quiet again, she was still there under her
little house, bright-eyed and confident.

The men were fond of flowers, too.
Later in the season, when flowers are more
abundant, the drivers will often be seen
picking the harebells that grow upon the
ledges, or a sprig of cardinal flower from
the water's edge. If there is a pond lily to
be had, it will be found twined into some
driver's hat-band, or looped about his
neck by its twisted stem. For some reason
they had not noticed that clump of lady's-
slippers at the Putting-in Place. There
they lifted their heads in brave array, thick-
set and green as to leaf, waxen and pure
white as to petal. Perhaps the men avoided
trampling on them, possibly they admired
and left them on their stalks, but for some
reason, neglect or conservation, no one
disturbed them.

Up, down, and across that carry for al-
most a week flitted the Girl and her attend-
ants, chatting, observing, photographing,

POSIES

167

fishing, idling in unalloyed delight through
the longest and brightest of summer days,
the guests of everybody. At any moment
and at any point between Chesuncook Pond
and Ambajemackomas, they were likely to
appear, she with her camera, Wilbur with
his rifle, and there was always some one
right there ready to be of service. Big
Oliver, the cook, had beans and biscuit
to spare in any quantity, — and they were
good. The men wanted to give her a
chance to see how a jam is picked, and
twenty of them picking off on the Little
Arches insisted on standing still, that she
might have a good chance to take their pic-
ture, while she as unweariedly waited for
them to get into action. The men on the
stations were always ready for a visit. There
was an Indian boy, tribe and name un-
known, who had plenty of time to spend a
little hunting for a partridge's nest, which
they never found, though they had some
fun in hunting. There was a Province lad
watching on the Little Arches when she
came to wait there for the men to come
down and pick a jam. He was on an island.

i68 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

to be reached only by walking a log across
to the shore ; but he must go ashore and
hunt up the butt end of a log to make
her a seat. Then because there was a cold
wind drawing down the gorge, in spite of
the warm June sunshine, he must go ashore
several times to get wood to build a fire
for her, by which they sat and chatted until
she saw just what is that homesickness
which takes a man engaged at dangerous
work far off from home. Evenings, Joe
Francis and Steve Stanislaus would come
dragging wearily up the hill to eat a little
supper at the tent, or to drink tea out of
tin dippers as they lay about the fire and
told stories, such stories that the echoes of
their laughter may be heard yet hanging
about the bluffs on Ripogenus. The morn-
ing after their arrival the Old Man came
down, — he was not at all old, being the
youngest of the three contractors of the
drive that year ; the name was a mere cour-
tesy title. Out of his short time with his
men he took almost half a day showing
points of interest, explaining the technical-
ities of the work, telling old stories, acting

POSIES

169

as guide himself all the way across to the
Big Eddy, three miles below, that nothing
worth seeing should be missed.

Such a perfect excursion in the woods
never was, and yet, although it did not
trouble her, the Girl had noticed some-
thing strange. Wherever she appeared the
men, if not too busy, seemed to be a little
watchful ; they were very careful of her ;
they treated her regardfuUy. She had the
strictest orders never to go out of sight
of her companions, and Wilbur always
carried his heavy Winchester, which she
knew was loaded. Is there danger in the
house of one's friends ? What possible
harm could threaten a girl so protected
by a universal good-will ? She knew that
she did not even need attendants on that
carry, much less a rifle to defend her.
There was nothing to shoot at that season.
If there had been, they did not wish to
shoot it. Moreover, it had been specially
arranged not to bring a gun on the excur-
sion. The girl was puzzled by this little
cloud of apprehension which every one
seemed to see except herself. It is the

170 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

custom in the woods to obey orders and
ask no questions : one who is keen arrives
at conclusions in other ways, and " other
ways " is precisely the woman's way.

The afternoon was hot, and it is a long
trip down to Ambajemackomas and back to
Ripogenus Lake. " What 's the use, Wil-
bur, to carry that big forty-four seventy ? "
said she. " The camera and plates are load
enough ; it 's six miles down there and
not a step less back again, and we Ve been
down to the Big Eddy and back this morn-
ing. Better leave the rifle behind, had n't
we?"

There is no wile feminine so hard to
fend against as a little friendly interest ;
Wilbur was caught unprepared.

" There 's nothing to shoot anyway at
this season," said she, helping him out, as
one does a trout with a landing-net.

" There 's bears," said he rather desper-
ately ; " you know June 's just the season
for bears to be running about."

She was entirely satisfied that it was not
bears. She was not afraid of bears anyway ;
yet she did not know what was the real

POSIES

171

reason for carrying the rifle, not knowing as
much as everybody else did.

For Wilbur Webster, when he arrived
at the carry, had brought down news ; Mr.
Murphy had verified it, and rumor there-
with picked up the report and ran with it as
only rumor can run, spreading everywhere
that the Sunday before, this being Thurs-
day, one Jack Russell had sworn openly in
the 'Suncook House that if certain people
came into the country where he was, he
would shoot them on sight. Two days
after that they appeared on the very spot
where he uttered his threat, and it remained
to be seen whether he would back down.
The situation was not without interest at
any time, but with a woman figuring in the
title role, it was unique ; certainly it ap-
pealed to the West Branch Drive. To have
a scoundrel like Jack Russell threaten to
shoot a lady who was their guest passed
the limit. They were no longer critical
spectators ; the game was their own, and
they played it with zeal.

Thereafter Wilbur became the centre of
innumerable conferences, all semi-private.

172 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

" Do they know it ? " was always the
first question.

" I told him first off," was Wilbur's
stereotyped answer. " We did n't want to
spoil her good time, so he said to take my
rifle, and we 'd see whether the woods was
a free country."

" S'pose she suspects anything ? "

" Should n't be so much surprised," re-
plied Wilbur. " When she asked me why
I lugged that big forty-four, I just floun-
dered around in my mind for a minute ;
you can't lie to her quite as easy as you
can to a sport, so I struck bears. ^ Yes,
there 's bears,' says she, kind of cool and
twinkling. She knows as well as I do about
how much bears are going to be bothering
around this whole West Branch Drive.'*

" What 's he got agin her ? " was an-
other question.

Then Wilbur explained the origin of
the grudge.

" Say, that so ? Can she prove it on
him ? "

" I ruther guess she holds a full house
on facts," modestly responded Wilbur, not

POSIES

173

stating that he was the man who had sup-
plied most of them, at some personal risk.

"Oh, it will stand law all right," said
Wilbur. They were waiting at the Put-
ting-in Place among the men gathered to
meet the luncheon boy. That was why so
many men had leisure to stand and talk.
It is one of the sights to see the luncheon
boy come trotting along with his firkin of
salt beef and baking-powder biscuit in one
hand, and in the other an immense coffee-
pot, carried by a bail, while down his back
hang a double row of pint dippers strung
together by the handles, reminding one of
Jack Mann's saying that the worst load he
ever carried was five hundred pint dippers
without handles against a head wind. The
Girl could very easily amuse herself quest-
ing about after birds and flowers, while she
waited for a chance to get a photograph
of the luncheon boy.

" The law,'' went on Wilbur, the Girl
just now being out of range, " is just the
thing Jack Russell got too much of out
in the States ; it 's more for his health to
stay up here to 'Suncook where he ain't

174 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

reminded of jails. Your Old Man has got
a warrant out agin him for assault, and the
sheriff could have both hands full of papers
if the complaints all came in to once. Jack
Russell takes his settlements out of court,
now you 'd better believe. Maybe what
he said to me wa'n't nothing but guff, but
maybe I ain't going to keep my eyes
peeled for things moving the bushes t' other
side the river ! "

" Oh, he ain't looking for trouble ; don't
you worry, Wilbur," said one.

" No, I ain't worrying any; I 'm keep-
ing my sights up for eighty yards and 2l
few extry cartridges in my right-hand
pocket."

A hunter's voice is always high-pitched,
and a little excitement, which makes him
forget his usual caution, will cause it to
carry far. The Girl heard this last remark.
She was some distance off one side, look-
ing at some flowers.

" Oh, come here, Wilbur," she called ;
"just look at this bunch of lady's-slippers !
Are n't they the prettiest ones you ever
saw ? "

POSIES

175

So Wilbur had to come and admire. It
seemed to the Girl that there had been
enough of a conversation which carried a
man's voice up so high and made him for-
get his proper caution. What he was say-
ing was very likely only ^^talk for P. I.'s "
(which is a sort of buncombe), but that
remark about the rifle-sights she bore in
mind. She sat down and thought it all out
at the next opportunity. She knew the
butt end from the muzzle of a rifle, and
knew that a hunter would not be likely to
have the slide of his sights up for any such
range ; but what he had said seemed to
have the ring of substantial truth about
it, that he was prepared for a long shot.
There are no long shots in the woods in
June ; one cannot see eighty yards then,
unless there is open ground ; here there
was no open except along the river. One
does n't go prepared to shoot bears across
a raging river with inaccessible bluff^s and
no means of crossing. Besides, bears would
never account for that stringent order never
to get out of sight. She was beginning to
perceive that here was some mystery.

176 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

What was it which Wilbur had told and
Mr. Murphy had corroborated ? That the
Sunday before at the 'Suncook House,
Jack Russell, " as mad as Mike," had spit
forth his spite against certain people.

What was it about ? Oh, about his kill-
ing rising twenty moose last summer for
their hides ; she had written something
about it, and had sent him one of the papers
with it in, so as to be fair.

" And if either of them ever puts foot
into this country again I 'm going to shoot
'em ! " said Jack Russell.

" Well," spoke up Wilbur, who was
among the crowd, " guess you won't have
to wait long for your chance. Jack."

" How 's that ? " asked several.

" Oh, I hear," went on Wilbur as non-
chalantly as if the letter announcing it were
not in his pocket, " that they are coming
up the Lake to-morrow, both of 'em."

" Where to ? " asked Jack, wavering.

" Ri' down here^ Jack." And the steel
in Wilbur's voice must have rung clear.

" Who 's goin' guide for 'em ? " inquired
Russell.

POSIES

177

" / be, Jack ! retorted Wilbur. Blades
were out then. Wilbur was a proved man,
and there was no mistaking what he meant.

This was too much for Jack Russell.
He found it was just the right time to set
some bear-traps up Harrington Lake way,
which was miles out of the road of all
tourists, far back in the woods. The whole
of Chesuncook rippled with laughter at
the performance, and then all subsided to
a calm. What disturbed Wilbur was that
Harrington lies on the further side of Ri-
pogenus, quite a convenient distance for
any one who wanted to stroll down for the
day and, in some warm and mossy nook,
to lie across an impassable chasm and take
pot-shots at photographing tourists scram-
bling over the rocks on the other side.

Meantime the Girl knew next to no-
thing of what was going on. Here and
there she caught some shred of conversa-
tion which, when raveled out, always gave
the name of Jack Russell, and she won-
dered into what sort of stuff it had been
woven, and especially what kind of goods
could bear Jack Russell's name on every

178 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

yard ; it was considered no guarantee of
quality at that time and place, for he came
as near being a desperado as any one there
in the woods. She did not think anything
about Jack Russell, least of all would she
have suspected that the drive was taking his
threat seriously. It was enough that every-
body was so kind, and that no one except
once ever did anything which displeased
her. That time she was angry — and then
she was n't.

It was one noon coming back from the
Big Eddy ; it was hot, and to save time
they were returning by the carry road
instead of by the river-bank. At the Put-
ting-in Place she looked for her clump of
posies. They were missing. Not one was
left.

A flame of anger burst forth at seeing
them so despoiled. " It 's a shame ! she
cried ; " I would n 't touch one of them,
they were so pretty, the prettiest moccasin-
flowers that ever were, and now some one
has gone and picked all that great bunch !
Can't people ever learn to leave a pretty
thing alone ! "

POSIES

179

Her anger had not cooled before there
came the dappled dawn of a new idea, and
she ceased to blame the spoilers until she
should be sure.

Men are fickle creatures, and those she
had seen here were about to be fed. If
they had picked the flowers to look at,
they would gaze at the waxy blooms a
moment, then roll them in their fingers
and, when the flowers hung limp and their
hands were full of meat and drink, they
would drop them where they stood. There
she would find the wilted, yellowing blos-
soms, with flabby, hanging pouch and drag-
gled, twisted pennons, telling the world-old
story of thoughtless ravage. She looked
all about. There were no flowers there.

Then she looked at the plants again,
more carefully. Their poor little denuded
stems stood up tall and stiflF, full length ;
every flower must have been nipped off
just beneath its little chin ; it was not
done hastily, nor ruthlessly with the whole
hand, but deliberately, with thumb and
finger.

Then she blushed, neck and ears, red-

i8o THE PENOBSCOT MAN

der than her hat. The doubtful dawn of
her idea was full day now ; she knew what
had happened. For there came to her some
chaffer on the way up from the Big Eddy.
She had stepped in a muddy spot in the
road, and they had told her, Wilbur and her
father, that of the men who saw that track
not one would ever efface it with his own ;
that sentiment still was dear to woodsmen.
She had laughed and thereafter avoided the
muddy places ; one would not wish to put
too great a strain upon sentiment. But now
she remembered that when she had called
to Wilbur, she had touched the flowers,
lifting their heavy heads as she praised
their beauty. That had sealed their doom.
In eleven different pockets, pressed in the
folds of a home letter or crumpled in the
corner of a greasy pocketbook, the eleven
little lady's-slippers were carried as keep-
sakes.

It is many years since that occurred, and
yet she can never help feeling guilty for
compassing the destruction of those pretty
flowers ; though glad that she can give to
them a more enduring life.

POSIES

i8i

That was not all, though she did not
know it till long afterwards, when the clerk
of the drive told the story. Wilbur's rifle
was really not of the slightest consequence ;
it might just as well have been left in
camp. For the West Branch Drive had
taken upon itself to settle everything in
its own thoroughgoing way. It decided
— that is, enough of it decided, and there
was no call for contrary-minded — that it
objected to having Jack Russell interfer-
ing with its company. Then they dis-
cussed the matter of ways and means.

" Send him word," said one, and who so
apt to be the man as the very one who had
grumbled loudest about having women
on the drive, " send him word to leave
our company alone. If he don't, tell him
we Ve got men enough and we Ve got
rope enough " —

The message was somewhat pointed.
It is quite a distance from- Ripogenus up
to Harrington, all woods, and P. L. D.
runs no post-office department ; but it
was delivered with dispatch. When Jack
Russell ran into us on the upper end of

1 82 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

Chesuncook Carry, a sort of head-on col-
lision, before the Smiths of Chesuncook
as outside witnesses, and it was fight, run,
or be friends, he was entirely civil. Al-
though too much must not be inferred
from such a statement, we parted quite
as cordial as when we met. However,
Ch^uncook shook with inextinguishable
laughter ; its merriment was both loud
and long-continued, and it became so dis-
turbing to Jack Russell's ears that by the
time the leaves were falling, he turned his
canoe prow northward, and was last seen
going down the Allegash in search of a
climate more congenial to his health.

VII

WORKING NIGHTS

WORKING NIGHTS

It was almost September, time for the
logs to have been down in Argyle and
Nebraska' and sorted, and here was North
Twin Thoroughfare with two big booms
choked in it. The little steamer that runs
to the head of the lake was forced to lie
by and wait for them, and aboard of her
two old river-drivers, leaning against the
pilot-house, were pouring contempt on all
they saw. It was not conversation, but a
series of snorts and snarls of disapproval,
which, by study, could be disentangled into
condemnation of — first, any company that
could be so behindhand with their logs
(for no such late drive as that of 1901 was
ever heard of) ; second, any crew of men
who would allow two booms to choke each
other in a narrow thoroughfare ; and third,
all men so imbecile as not to see the way
to unsnarl the tangle.

' At Argyle, Nebraska, and Pea Cove booms, the logs
are sorted by the log-marks of the owners.

i86 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

The men upon the logs ran around
aimlessly, Hke bewildered ants; they got a
piece of spare boom, much too short, and
with it lengthened one of the main booms;
when it failed to relieve the congestion in
the narrows, they did not know what to
do ; they tugged and pried and poked and
hauled, they went sloshing and spattering
and bouncing around on the logs, and no-
thing came of their labors. For four hours
the little steamer lay there, and still the
problem of those two booms was as great
as in the beginning*

The veterans on the steamboat were
entirely free in giving their opinions about
the whole performance to every one but
the men at work. To them they oiffered
no suggestions. A calm aloofness charac-
terized their demeanor.

" Any ten-year-old child could tell 'em
what they 'd ought to do," said one of the
old men to the other ; " all they 've got to
do is just to cut both booms an' jine the
ends of 'em, and they 'd slip those logs
through them narrers like a cat goin'
through a hole. Makes a heap of differ-

WORKING . NIGHTS 187

enceif there 's two cats both bent on gittin'
through at the same time !

" Course ! " agreed the other; " any fool
could tell 'em that, only half tryin' ; but
what do you expect of 'em this year, when
there ain't a single man on the drive that
knows the river ? "

I took the phrase home with me — not
a single man on the West Branch Drive
who " knew the river " ! It was sheer im-
possibility, for there were always twenty
men at least, any one of whom could have
carried the whole drive down from Che-
suncook to the boom. It had always been
the glory of the West Branch Drive that
it had so many men who had driven the
river for a score, for thirty, some for al-
most forty years. The men love that river
as they love no other ; it is the most diffi-
cult, the most dangerous, the most honor-
able post to be found, and the pride and
boast of the West Branch Drive has always
been, not its supple young foam-walkers,
who could traverse the froth of those white
rapids without wetting a shoe-tap, but its

188 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

battle-scarred boatmen, who " knew the
river." For one who survived, many, it is
true, had died young, but these older ones
had all been lions in their day.

" Billy," said I, when I got home, speak-
ing confidentially to one who had served
his three and thirty years on the West
Branch Drive, "where were you this spring
— West Branch as usual ? "

" Oh, no," said he slowly, " I did n't
drive this spring ; I 'm gettin' most too
old for that." He began river-driving at
the ripe age of thirteen, though it was some
years before he qualified as a West Brancher ;
and he probably would know how to handle
a boat even yet.

" Where was Joe ? where was Steve ?
where was Joe Solomon? where was
Prouty ? where was this one, that one,
the other ? "

These were a dozen names that spelled
West Branch in large letters. He shook
his head at every name. — Where were
they all ? Oh, at home ; all getting old like
himself, or at some easier trade than river-
driving, or oflF on East Branch working for

WORKING NIGHTS 189

Con Murphy, who was a lumberman from
the peavey up.

My sky had fallen. Never had I heard
of anything more astonishing. Then light
broke through a rift, but it was the light
of a gray day. Times had changed. It
was P. L. D. no longer ; no longer the
old " Company " for which our men had
slaved so wilHngly; no longer Ross, Mur-
phy, and Smart contracting for the drive;
no longer any of the old neighborly names
that we had always known ; no longer men
above who had been the messmates and
bunk-mates of those below ; no longer men
below who obeyed orders only when they
did not see a better way, who worked with
all the strength there was in them, and on
day wages were partners in interest and
responsibility in as fine a piece of co-
operative labor as any man can instance.
The loudest grumbling I ever heard from
river-drivers was not about their food, or
their wages, or their long hours, but about
being ordered to leave certain small parcels
of logs which it would cost unduly to save ;
they wanted to " leave the river all neat

190 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

and clean ; they were anxious to do their
work well.

The times had changed indeed. That
year the great stranger company had taken
the drive to show us how much better
Millions of Money can manage those
things. There was a railroad to its own
doors ; there were steamboats at its service
on all the lakes ; it had a telephone the
length of the river ; it had unlimited capi-
tal,— and all these our own leaders lacked,
fighting the wilderness bare-handed. Be-
sides, the Great Company very nearly
owned the state : it owned the water-power ;
it owned the forest land ; it guided legis-
lation ; it had made enormous improve-
ments and was contemplating others which
will end God knows where, if they do not
improve us all out of existence. It was
supreme, the incarnation of the Money
Power, the eidolon of the Juggernaut
Capital which is pictured as ready to crush
all who will not bow down — and some
who do. Never before had we seen any-
thing which quite so boldly flaunted the
legend. Money is Power. It could do

WORKING NIGHTS 191

what it pleased. It could buy what it
pleased. It could buy everything.

Everything but men !

So not a single man of the old West
Branch guard had bowed down to it, not
a single man who knew the river had bent
to its magnificence, but every man of them
had shouldered his cant-dog and marched
off to work for one who was "a lumber-
man from the peavey up." It was superb.
It was epically large.

The Millions of Money had it all their
own way that year. The Great Company
showed us many things about log-driving,
chiefly by way of bad example. It has just
had an opportunity given it in the courts
to make partial reparation for its sins of
ignorance. However these other damages
fall out, that to its own reputation is quite
beyond repair. It has been demonstrated
that Money cannot drive logs, nor buy the
men who can do it. The splendor of the
Dollar, in public imagination at least, has
suflTered an eclipse.

But still the cost ! Comrades of the pea-

192 THE PENOBSCOT MAN'

vey, that was your swan-song. Nevermore
will you gather in the springtime, as you
used to do, to fight the furious river for
the logs committed to your care, raging like
wild Achilles over his fallen friend; never-
more will you work eighteen hours a day
and call it fun ; nevermore toil for ninety
days or a hundred without a break ; never-
more (and here's the test) will you be called
on to work nights. And I, never again shall
I behold men looking like those I used to
see when they came off the drive — white
and Indian crisped almost to a blackness
by the sun, baked with the heat, bitten by
black flies, haggard, gaunt, sore-footed,
so that, once their driving-boots were off,
their parboiled feet could endure none but
the softest kid or congress cloth, and even
those I have seen them remove whenever
they could ; and above all sleepy, falling
asleep while they talked to you, gaping
from unutterable weariness, dropping into
a dead slumber if left alone for a moment,
and waking with a jump when anything
stirred. In those days they worked both
day and night.

WORKING NIGHTS 193

Lewey Ketchum was talking with me
about it. "They don't know how to work
now, and they never will work again the
way they used to. In those days we had
breakfast and everything packed into the
boats before it was daylight. You could
hear them clinking things about in the
boats before you could see the boats, if the
morning was n't clear, and we were out on
the logs before daybreak/' One hardly
needs to be reminded that in these north-
ern latitudes dawn comes early in June.

" And then we used to work nights."
That other, mark you, was just the day's
work, even though it began not much
after midnight. " We could do more work
nights. Logs run faster then, can't tell
why, but they do; so we used to sluice
nights, and booming down the lakes was
mostly done at night, — that is, we got
along faster nights. If we had stopped to
do it all by day, we would never have fin-
ished it, with the winds springing up. You
see, we did n't have any steamers in those
days, and the logs all had to be towed by
hand. Now they 've got steamers on all the

194 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

lakes, and the men think they can't do any-
thing without them. They '11 wait half a
day to save an hour's paddling. But in the
old times — well, you know it was hard and
dangerous, but we did it because we liked
it. It 's a whole lot of fun to go into a bad
place where you just know you can come
out all right if something don't happen.
You get to liking it. You get to wanting
it when the year comes round. We always
went on the drive just because we liked to
be there, such a lot of men on the logs
and all trying to get them along and beat
each other, and all having a good time at
it. It was n't the pay " — (and no one ever
supposed it was the pay. West Branch-
ers, good though it was in those days) —
" we did n't work just our money's worth.
There was all those logs to be taken care
of, and it kind of seemed as if a man ought
to do the best he could. Everybody in
those days did the best he could."

It is the testimony of an English Indian,
Tobique bred ; and I would that I might
show you how, in placing the stress upon
a question of duty where our own French-

WORKING NIGHTS 195

descended Indians would have laid it upon
necessity, — a relic of the days of // faut
and il doit^ what they " had got to do/' not
what they "ought to do," — I catch the
glow in Lewey's quarterings of the red
coat of Her Majesty's colonel, and hear the
echo, a hundred years and half the world
removed, of the cheers that answered Nel-
son's signal at Trafalgar. So fine a thing
as this that Lewey said must be uncon-
scious. It shows clearly enough what their
work has done for these men's ideals. Hire
an old riverman to work for you, and there
will be little cause for complaint.

Two hundred and fifty ' men, all doing
the best they could ! That was high en-
deavor, and it made manly worth. I know
that in their own words the West Branch
Drive " wa'n't no holy Sunday-school," and
with them the fireside moralities were often
lacking ; but over against their most shock-
ing breaches of morals balance the magni-
ficent morale of more than two hundred
men (not to mention the many hundreds

I The West Branch Drive numbered from 150 to 200
men at the start, and 250 or 300 men later when the logs
cut lower down had been received.

196 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

being educated on all the other drives)
who were living sternly up to this high
ideal of duty. When they died, they died
doing their duty ; when they lived, they
carried back to field and forge and camp
and trade the habit of doing the best they
could ; and the leaven of their example
permeated the whole class till they toler-
ated no shirking, no " sogering," no un-
faithfulness to a trust. The Penobscot
man is a willing worker, capable in emer-
gencies, true to his trust, knowing well the
difference between " ought " and " ought
not." And the drive was the college where
he learned all this.

How much does a man working at day
wages think he ought to do to earn his hire ?

Here is the story Lewey Ketchum told
me : it was rather a funny story, he said, —
at least he told it for such, omitting much
which I am bound to supply, and not
suggesting that there was anything meri-
torious in what he did, because of course
" a man ought to do the best he can." So
many ellipses of information and explana-

WORKING NIGHTS 197

tion have to be filled in by me that I can-
not reproduce his soft, cadenced English,
wholly unlike our knotty Yankee idiom.

He was on Chesuncook — Gazungook,
as he softened it, Indian fashion — in
charge of a boom. It was the last boom
of the rear, and he must not keep the
crews waiting. There was no steamer there
then, — there was none till 1 891,— and all
booms had to be towed by hand. Now
Chesuncook is a lake eighteen miles long,
and a boom comprised from two to five
millions of feet of logs. To tow by hand
such a heavy, unwieldy float of logs, many
acres in extent, for so great a distance was
always a work of magnitude. If the wind
was contrary, it became by so much the
harder; great loss of time might result
from having to anchor under the shore ;
or of labor, from being carried back even
to the starting-point ; or of money, from
logs rolling out from under the boom, or
the boom itself parting and all its contents
being spread abroad, a great portion of
them never to be recovered. Delays were ^
costly, the risks great, the labor terribly

igS THE PENOBSCOT MAN

severe. Three days and nights it took,
under favorable conditions, to warp a boom
down Chesuncook, and it was heaving
anchor all the way. Ask any sailor about
work at the capstan bars, and then ask
him what he would think of taking three
days and nights of it without change of
watches ; probably he would tell you that
it cannot be done. And yet it always was
done in warping booms across our lakes,
and one crew of men had to do it. Their
meals were brought to them from the
shore, and what little sleep they got they
took upon the head-works ; but there was
very little sleep for any one unless they
had to anchor under the lee of the land.

To make all clear, the great boom, made
of logs linked end to end, having been
stretched about all the loose logs it can
safely hold, is made fast by a short warp
to the head-works. This is a raft of triply
cross-piled logs, one log long by about
fourteen wide, all hewed to fit and stoutly
treenailed together. Up to a recent date
> iron was too scarce in these remote out-
posts of the woods for any common use.

WORKING NIGHTS 199

and wood had to take its place ; even at
Chesuncook the booms were always double
thorough-shotted with stout wooden pins
instead of being linked with chains.

Upon the head-works raft was set the
capstan, a great spool made of a single
log, revolving about a central shaft, and
pierced around the top for eight capstan
bars. There were no pawls at the bottom,
as on ship capstans, to prevent its surging
back, but a number of small sticks slant-
ing upward toward the barrel kept the
warp from fouling under the spool. An
anchor, seldom weighing over three hun-
dred pounds, and about a thousand feet
of inch and a half rigging are used in a
warping boom. To judge of the weight of
the warp, it is enough to say that, laid in
coils with slack between, it takes twelve
men, — the drivers at Ripogenus told me
it would take fifteen men, — each carrying
a coil upon his shoulder, to lug such a
warp across a carry. These long warps are
left behind, but I saw them carrying the
shorter but heavier hawsers for sweeping
the eddies, and as the undulating line

200 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

crawled slowly up the hill, it looked like the
folds of a great serpent. The anchor, the
long booming-warp, the stout snubbing-
hawsers, and a boat are the chief equip-
ment of a booming crew. The anchor is
boated out ahead and dropped ; then all
hands man the capstan bars, two men to
a bar, and begin to spool up the warp.
When the anchor is under-foot, the boom
is left to drift with the headway already
gained ; twelve of the men boat out the
anchor while the other four feed off the
warp from the spool. Then the boat
comes back, the men tumble out upon the
head-works, and throw themselves upon
the capstan bars, to begin their tramping
around and around and around, as they
wind up the straining warp. Thus, inch
by inch, the boom is drawn across the lake,
two or three miles in a day of twelve hours
being all that a full crew at the bars can
accomplish.

Lewey Ketchum's crew took their logs
at Umbazooksus, the very head of the lake.
It was about dusk when they tied their

WORKING NIGHTS 201

boat to the stern snubbing-post of the
head-works and wound the first turns of
the warp upon the windlass. They worked
well, boating out, warping up, heaving
anchor, inch by inch, foot by foot, by the
main strength of their arms hauHng along
that great unwieldy float of logs. They
made a path around the capstan where their
spiked shoes tore out the splinters, — all
within bright and new, all without new
and bright, and that circle fouled with the
wear of many spike-shod feet. That was
the first night. Then the hawser began to
bite into the barrel of the capstan, and left
ridges where the heavy rope had jammed
the fibres of the wood. That was the first
day. Then the hawser began to show the
fray of running over the front of the raft,
and little pick-ends of hemp stood out
from it. That was the second night. Then
the men began to show it, men being
tougher than wood and hemp, and able to
stand more strain. They began to fall
asleep at their work ; they began to drink
strong tea to keep themselves awake, and,
in spite of that, they nodded as they paced

202 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

round and round and round the capstan,
and fell fast asleep, still working, never
forgetting to step a little higher as the
warp rose with each revolution, but mov-
ing more slowly because they were asleep.
That was the second day. Yet their work
was but two thirds completed. The third
night was coming.

Not that Lewey Ketchum let his men
work thus continuously without rest or
change. He knew too well how to get
work done to make that mistake. There
came sometimes a little breeze favoring
them, and then Lewey had some spreads
laid down and made his men turn in.
They lay down like a basket of kittens,
curled up all sorts of ways, but kept from
rolling off by the bulwark around the head-
works. Glad enough were they for the
rest and sleep, yet before they took it
they made a sail out of another of the
great woods spreads, ample enough to cover
twenty men, stretching it upon light poles
put up before the capstan. Sometimes the
breeze would last an hour or two, and the
raft would sail as far as if they had been

WORKING NIGHTS 203

manning the capstan bars all the time.
Then the breeze would die away, or it
would draw down Cuxabexis, or it would
be openly unfavorable, and then once more
it was " Turn out, boys ! " and the anchor
was laid out ahead and the capstan groaned
again. But the men had been refreshed,
and came to their task as good as new.

But not so Lewey. He never shut his
eyes. While the others slept, he watched.
They might get refreshment ; he must go
to the end of his task without it. The
men offered to take his place and give him
a chance to sleep. He knew their good-
will, and also how, having had a little sleep,
they would fall back into it all the more
readily. No man could take his responsi-
bility, and he would let no man take his
place. That was the last boom of the rear ;
if that were carried back, the whole drive
must wait for it, and he would risk nothing.
So there he sat watching while the rest
slumbered.

It may have been that they had a lan-
tern on the corner of the raft to guide the
boat in boating out ; it may have been, as

204 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

in old times, that upon a graveled space
they had built a little fire, and that there
as formerly they kept a kettle of tea, which
boiled day after day, the grounds never
emptied, but a new handful and a fresh
supply of lake water added whenever the
supply ran low. By the third night this
would have tanned sole leather : it was
very nearly strong enough to keep a man
awake. One can see that Lewey must have
gone to it often, not for the tea, nor that
it should keep him awake, but just to
make an errand. It is so still and quiet
broad off in a lake at night that if one
sits, making no movement, although not
asleep at all, he falls into a moon-gaze
and, being quite conscious, is yet unable to
move ; he sits rigid, and his soul wanders
off upon the waters and cannot get back
again into his body. That is just as bad
as being asleep.

There was little enough to see. The
stars were out in northern clearness, and,
as the night lagged on, he saw the Virgin
pace across the sky, following the sickle
of Leo and the Twins, and down the lake

WORKING NIGHTS 205

he saw the Scorpion rise, with upraised
sting and red Antares in his head. But
the stars are a silent folk, indifferent com-
pany to one who does not know them
well. Of sounds which he did know there
were few enough. There was the wash of
the ripple along the logs, the creak of the
thorough-shots, groaning occasionally, the
slacking of the big quilt if it spilled a little
of the breeze. A horned owl hooted twice
from the shore ; a fish jumped once ; a
night-flying wild duck steamed past at full
speed, whippering his wings just over the
water, and once, oflF the mouth of Caribou,
a loon lifted his voice in a long and deso-
late cry. Yet the sounds came so seldom.
All that made it seem that he was not
floating midway between the stars burning
above him in the sky and those twinkling
below him in the glassy lake was the fire
on the corner of the raft and the sterto-
rous breathing of fifteen tired men asleep
behind him. The loon called again. He
wondered if it betokened a change of wind.
He dipped his finger in the lake and held
it up to catch the breeze. The wind had

2o6 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

died away. "Turn out, boys ! came the
word. Already the morning star was pal-
ing all her sisters ; it was almost time for
breakfast on the drive, and the crew was
ready to go to work with new spirit.

Perhaps Lewey could rest now, for they
were getting well along toward the piers.
But Lewey could not rest. It was his boom
to see safe in, and until he had given up
the charge of it, accidents might happen.
The crew were waiting for that last boom
of logs, and he must not fail them. Lewey
must work, and work as hard as any of his
men, for the boss of a driving crew never
wears kid gloves ; all his authority comes
to him from going where no one else dares
go, from beginning first and quitting last,
from doing the most work in the best
manner.

So Lewey braced to the handspikes and
began to heave on the anchor. He did not
even doze while he walked round and
round the capstan. He was too far gone
for that. There was a little fever no doubt,
and some twitching of the nerves, but he
was very strong, and he moved on springs ;

WORKING NIGHTS 207

people feel that way when they have gone
without sleep long enough. He did not
always answer quickly to the men ; he did
not hear them, — the veins in his temples
sang too loud for clear hearing ; but there
was no man who could do more work.
When he got his boom down where it
was to be turned out for sluicing, he had
been three full days and nights without
sleep, and most of the time working at the
hardest sort of labor.

It was getting along toward supper-time
when they went up to the carry. Lewey
saw that his men had something to eat,
and told them to turn in. It did not mat-
ter if it was not dark ; they could sleep
anywhere now, and had earned an extra
allowance. They turned in, ^nd in two
minutes were as sound asleep as rabbits.

Now comes what Lewey called the
funny part of his story. A good deal of
the above he did not tell me. He spoke
as to a comrade who could supply all the
details, which accordingly I have supplied,
because I know what must have been true.
He himself sped straight to the point that

2o8 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

after three days and nights he could not
sleep. It was all so noisy on the carry.
Men came and went, and they shook
the ground so. He did not hear them
much, but he felt the ground shake. And
the little birds made such a cheeping and
bother about going to bed ; their small
voices were pitched high, so that he could
not help hearing. As the dusk fell and
the evening star grew golden, the frogs
peeped and piped, and an old bull-paddock'
off somewhere bellowed like a moose in
October. After that the men were restless,
lying in a long line under their shelter tent.
It sounded like the bellows and the forges
of an anchor factory to hear them. His
wrists throbbed and he could hear his heart
and the pulse in his temples, and he could
not close his eyes because he could see so
many things. It was like looking under
the ocean through a water-glass, he could
see so many things which no one else could
see. Not a wink of sleep did he get, and
that the fourth night.

His men turned out fresh and bright.

* A local and ancient name for the bullfrog.

WORKING NIGHTS 209

" Had a good sleep ; makes a man feel
fit," said they, stretching their arms.

Lewey felt weak in his arms, and he had
no appetite for beans. His men looked
solicitous, — offered rude kindnesses, bade
him loaf for the day and see if idleness
could not unstring his nerves. After some
hours of hanging about the wangan and
the carry-end, it seemed to him that, if he
could get off somewhere where it was quiet,
he might perhaps go to sleep. Indian-
fashion, he said nothing about his inten-
tions, but took a little spread, his own
private property, for he never liked to use
the bedding common to the crew, and
along in the morning he started off into
the woods. He went perhaps a quarter of
a mile, till he could hear neither the logs,
the lake, nor the men, and found a smooth,
dry spot among the trees. The birds did
not cheep so loudly as they had done earlier
in the morning, and it was quiet and calm
there. Lewey wrapped himself up head
and ears, — any one who has ever camped
with him knows how like a great gray
chrysalis he can make himself appear, a

210 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

human Cecropia^ covered with dew, dead
twigs, and dry leaves, which, in a night
of sleeping out, adhered to his blanket
cocoon ; one would never think there
was a man inside, but expect it to hatch
a mammoth butterfly. Even after he got
all rolled up, he kept on seeing things
as before ; but in a quarter of an hour he
ceased to realize that he was living in a
glass case a mile above the earth, a kind
oblivion stole over him, and he slept.

That was the last Lewey knew. There
is no means of measuring time in sleep, and
when we wake, even from the sleep of
death, it will always be the next morning.
When he waked it was because an unex-
plained hunger gnawed him. He felt quite
himself, not very strong perhaps, but fresh
and bright and able to hear things properly.
The sun was getting near meridian; he
calculated that he had had four hours*
sleep. He had not eaten any breakfast,
he remembered, and that quite accounted
for his friendly feeling toward the cook.
So he took his spread upon his shoulder
and went back to the carry.

WORKING NIGHTS 211

But there he was Rip Van Winkle :
there was not a man there ; there was not
a log there ; there was not a boat ; there
was no one at the dam ; every single thing
was gone ; the ashes of the fire were cold,
the blackened embers lay dispersed, the
cross-bills were pecking around the empty
pork barrels for the salt, and the red squir-
rels stretched their necks from behind old
camp-wood, wondering if they dared come
near enough to snatch a coveted morsel
of stale bread. Lewey was dumfounded.
He had left a large crew here when he went
to sleep, and now the rear had cleaned up
everything ; they had hidden the anchors
and carried off the warp and gotten the
last barrel of wangan out of the way, and
no one had been across the carry that day.
He could not tell how long he had been
asleep, — a day, two days, a week, — nor
whether he should come up with the crew
at all before the logs were all in boom.

He took his spread by the centre, and
holding it with the corners dragging down
his back, he set off down the carry. It is
half a mile across ; when he got to the lower

212 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

end he could see, almost down to the out-
let of Ripogenus Lake, the first signs of
human life, two head-works, one on either
side, warping down the rear. It is quite a
cry across that lake, and as there was no
boat awaiting his convenience, Lewey took
the path along the right-hand shore. It
was almost noon, and he was faint and
dizzy, but there was nothing else to do. It
was not till he was well down toward the
carry that any one discovered him. Then a
shout went up.

" There 's Lewey ! "

" See there ! that 's Lewey now ! "

" Say, Lewey 's found himself all right."

" Hello, Lewey ! been padouksi ? " —
which is to say, sleepy.

" Well, sleepy-head, tell us, is it to-day
or to-morrow ? "

They made him the butt of all sorts of
jokes, but seemed uncommonly glad to
see him. Lewey did not say it, of course,
but he was always a prime favorite on the
drive, and it seems that they had become
alarmed on his account.

They had been worried when he did not

WORKING NIGHTS 213

appear after a reasonable time ; they had
become most anxious when he delayed un-
reasonably, for there in the dew and the
dead leaves and the silvery spiders' webs,
the bright sunshine and the green leaves
blotched with yellow light, Lewey Ketchum
had slept a whole day and a night and a
half of a day again. The drivers had done
some nine hours' work on their second
day before he showed himself. Meanwhile
some accident was feared, and they had
hunted for him everywhere. Dazed with
loss of sleep, he might have tumbled into
the lake, and they searched the water round
the dam. Or he might have wandered off
into the woods, and half the crew had been
out whooping and hallooing to call him in.
Then they thought that, crazed with sleep-
lessness, he might be in such condition
that he could not understand their uproar
even if he heard it, and might wander hope-
lessly and perish in the wilderness. So they
had sent men all the way through to the
Grant Farm to spread the news of a man
lost.

And all that time Lewey was quietly

214 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

sleeping within rifle-shot of the camp.
Being an Indian and a hunter, he had
known how to hide himself, and being en-
veloped head and ears in his spread, the
trump of Gabriel would not have roused
him, even if all the lesser angels had joined
in the fanfare,

" It was," so Lewey told me, laughing,
" very funny." But about a man's work-
ing three days and nights without sleep,
because he was a day laborer on other men's
property and thought it was his duty to
do the best he could, Lewey had nothing
to say : that was all part of the day's work.
It was customary in those days for a man
to do the best he could.

The Great Company can train all that
out of our men : we are quick to learn.
We heard the evidence in the big log case
which for four days was a school of the
woods to the people of Bangor, and it was
plain enough that there was a difference.

The Great Company was, in polite legal
terms, requested to answer to a question
of tort for the loss of logs committed to

WORKING NIGHTS 215

its care in the year 1901, the same being
due to willful neglect or to gross incompe-
tence. A lawyer could put it much less
candidly, but that was the popular impres-
sion from the evidence. Actions for tort
for log-cases were such a novelty that this
proved a sensational attraction ; nearly
everybody was there to hear and to form
an opinion. The fourth day of the trial,
the interest growing rather than abating,
they had upon the stand a witness who was
a lumberman " from the peavey up." He
was an expert ; almost forty years he had
put in on the river as master and man.
When he used to go on the drive, he testi-
fied, the crews did their best work sluicing
at night, but " nowadays they don't seem
to work much nights." The spectators
laughed, — so many of them had worked
on the logs themselves; they felt so strongly
for the old times and burned so hot against
the new. The counsel for the defense flut-
tered at the phrase and objected, — he, too,
understood, — and the offensive clause was
stricken out.

They do not work much kt night now.

2i6 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

it is true. Whose fault? There is no
need of it, — and that is well. But in the
old time, when they did it because a man
ought to do the best he can, the example
of faithfulness to a trust was set them by
their leaders, and they made a fair copy of
it. They were quick to imitate, — and they
had never heard about actions of tort, —
and they were silly enough never to weigh
their labor over against their duty.

It was the requiem of the West Branch
Drive that Con Murphy sang when he
said that " nowadays they don't seem to
work much nights." Great Corporations
get only what they pay for, or a little less ;
what men slave for, die for, work nights
for, is an Ideal, an Example, and a Man.

VIII

THE NAUGHTY PRIDE OF
BLACK SEBAT AND OTHERS

THE NAUGHTY PRIDE OF
BLACK SEBAT AND OTHERS

I WAS more than a little angry with the
man. He lived in such a nice and finick-
ing world, where every virtue was scrubbed
and dusted to the last degree and then
set on a shelf marked " Please do not han-
dle," — real Dresden shepherdesses of
virtues, of no use to any one. Of the rough
and tumble of qualities, good and bad, in a
mucky world, and the way in which some
of the best of them become besmeared with
vices and yet all the while are big, living,
breathing, life-engendering virtues, he had
no comprehension. A diamond in the
rough was no diamond at all to him.

I told him frankly that he lacked eyes.
He could not see it so, — the blind never
can; yet here he was, in his blindness,
complaining of our lacking sentiment.

" You know nothing whatever about it,"
I returned rather hotly.

220 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

His looks said, "You are very rude,
but I am too much a gentleman to say so."

(One who was a little less a gentleman
and a little more a man would have come
up gladly to that challenge, I thought;
either he did know or else he did not —
why evade the point ?)

" What has brought our logs in for the
last fifty years has been very nearly one
third pure sentiment," said I, challenging
again.

" That 's nonsense," he objected.

" Their ideals " — said I.

"The-ir i-^^-als," he drawled, and the
repetition was cynicism rouged and pow-
dered ; " and what, pray, leads you to sup-
pose that they have any i-/^^^-als?"

I had a choice of evils — to retire in
anger, nominally defeated, or to argue
down one who could never see the point.

" I can prove it," I asserted.

"And / doubt it," he returned suavely.
" I'de-als ! My eye and Betty Martin !
What do such rough fellows know about
ideals ? They know nothing but rum and
fighting and sickening displays of silly

BLACK SEBAT 221

bravado ! Have n't they any faults, these
rivermen of yours ? "

I saw my opening. "Ye-es/' said I,
remembering Sam Weller and looking
metaphorically at the skylight ; " there is
no doubt but they are proud."

" Which undoubtedly, like all the rest,
is pardonable?" He was ironical.

" Which may be left to others to judge
whether it is pardonable or not ; there is
no question of its being black pride. While
you are about it, you may as well prepare to
modify your opinionated doubts" — that
was rather good, " opinionated doubts,"
almost an epigram — " concerning senti-
ment in log-driving and the ideals of log-
drivers. It will be no harder to admit one
of my points than all."

" No, no harder," said he, blandly irri-
tating. " Go on with your story."

By the way that he slipped down into
his chair and made himself comfortable with
a palmleaf fan before his eyes, I wondered
whether he was not preparing to be bored.
But then, how could any one help enjoying
Black Sebat ? To think of him is to have

222 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

a little warmer feeling toward the world,
and to forgive some of its shortcomings.

Can any one who is old enough to re-
member so far back ever forget that hot,
dry summer of the Centennial year? A
hot July, and a hot and rainless August,
and a September hotter than either. It
was beautiful, but one drooped under the
merciless pelting of the sun. Even the last
of September, train-loads of sight-seers, re-
turning from the great exposition, full of
pride, patriotism, and enthusiasm, anxious
to talk to fellow-travelers of the wonders
they had seen, gasped mute in the cars, and
with every door and window open, coatless
and collarless, regardless of all proprieties,
hung limp upon the arms of their own car-
seat, or the back of the one in front.

Such a train-load was crossing the Con-
necticut River at Springfield ; it was not a
river, merely a gravel-bed with a few pools
of water here and there.

" Ma ! ma ! " shrilled a boy, no more
pervious to the heat than a cicada, "what 's
the matter with that river ? "

BLACK SEBAT 223

" The only trouble with that river," said
a passenger, willing to relieve the tired
mother, "is that the bottom is too near
the top ; otherwise that is a very good
river."

That was the year, and the river was
in that condition, when John Ross made
his great Connecticut River Drive. Only
two days before that train-load of tourists
' crossed, he had gotten it out safe, past all
the hazards of drought and heat. The
men talk about that drive yet. " And they
made a song about that drive," says your
guide, squatting before the frying-pan with
his uplifted fork raised like a tuning-fork ;
" I disremembers the whole of it, but there
was something in it about

* Old Burke he gave a whoop,
Harrigan gave a sw^agan.
And Black Jack gave a soup. '

That's all I can think to tell you about
that song now, but that drive of John
Ross's it was a great drive, and that about
the song is all so ; you need n't not doubt a
word of it, for Black Jack did make a soup
just the same way that song says." He

224 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

spears the bacon in the frying-pan and
drives it around a little, as if he were han-
dling big pine. "But that drive was a
great drive all the same," says he.

Why John Ross and the West Branch
Drive were off on the Connecticut River
that year ; how they got the logs through
on a river of such length, with no storage
of water, in the face of such a drought ; how
they beat out fearful friends and taunting
foes and strangers who were betting high
on its being an impossibility, and all for
the honor of the Penobscot name, is a story
too large to be pictured on this little page.
They all toiled terribly from early spring
till mid-September, the longest drive ever
heard of up to that date ; and had the men
been forced to come home beaten, there is
no telling what they would have done, but
it would near have broken their hearts.
If they had not had child's faith and
man's faith in John Ross, and if he had
not known just the stuff that was behind
him and what they would do for him, — -
if, in short, there had not been a general at
the head and a miniature army behind, they

BLACK SEBAT 225

never could have taken that drive through.
It was a great drive.

My father was with that train-load of
people that hot day when the boy asked
what was the matter with the river. He
was the one who explained the difficulty.
Such a day as that he thought he had never
experienced in all his life, the most of it
spent out of doors. It was the heat of a
strange country, the drought of a foreign
land, among people who, though charm-
ingly kind, were not quite of kin ; it was
all unlike the home country, and in two
weeks — he took particular notice — he
never heard a man swear.

He arrived in Boston, and in half an hour
he was home again. A chill sea-wind was
blowing, which made him reach for his over-
coat. There was a tonic smell of salt in the
air. On board the steamer, crowding about
the bows, were thirty or more Penobscot
river-drivers, the first to arrive or the last
to get through celebrating, just oflF from
Ross's Connecticut River Drive. He chron-
icled the fact that all he had lost in the way
of swearing in those last two weeks was

226 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

made up to him within fifteen minutes, with
a considerable surplus to put out at inter-
est. However, he was right at home, and
he had need to be an octopus, or a polypus,
orBriareus the hundred-handed, to take all
the hands that were stretched out to him.
So they got him in the centre of the circle,
and those who knew him crowded round
where they could clap him on the shoulder
when a hand was lacking, while those who
did not know him stood one side and very
politely looked at the toes of their boots.
Everybody talked at once.

" Hullo, Manry ! That was an Indian,
with a big slap on the shoulder.

" Say, glad to see you. Manly,'' — crisp
and clear, and that was a white man, with
a handshake.

" My soul, but we ben berry much
blessed for seen you," — from an Indian
again, holding out both hands.

" Well, by jings ! where did they rain
you down from. Manly ? *' — the hearty
greeting of a white man.

Then little Sebattis Solomon pushed up
for his turn. " By jolly, but we just so glad

BLACK SEBAT

227

seen our own brudder!" That was Black
Sebat, who never had a brother that any
one ever heard of.

There is no lack of heartiness in a river-
driver if he is a friend of yours, and these
were typical of their class, newly fledged
from the slop-shop most likely, but still
wearing their spike-soled boots, and not
asking the officers of the steamer whether
or no it was agreeable to the management.
(All boat and train officials coming into
Bangor had long since learned not to offer
advice upon that subject unasked.) They
were cheerful, if not actually inebriate, but
orderly enough, and they were proud and
very happy ; there was no keeping to them-
selves their satisfaction at getting that
drive in.

" She got it his dribe in all right John
Loss ; I tell you we done him ! " announced
little Sebat, grinning and shining all over
his dark face. They called him Black Se-
bat and Old Black. He was a short, small
man, as black as Sambo, hardly more than
a feather-weight, but incredibly strong and
wiry. He could tend sled all alone, the

228 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

only man, an old lumberman said, that he
ever saw who could do it, for that is two
men's work. And he was devoted to the
West Branch Drive and John Ross. That
was the first thing he wanted to talk about.
" Dem logs she ben all hung up, ain't for
us," he declared. There was more evi-
dently on his mind ; one who knew Sebat
could tell when he was preparing to make
known some feat of his.

" What did I hear about running Ca-
naan Falls ? " asked my father, making a
good guess at it.

" Ah, ya-as, dem Sappiel Orson an' Se-
bat Clossian she ben gone over Canaan
Falls," beamed Sebattis, trying to be non-
chalant.

" Dem Mitch Soc Francis she ben
drowndit herself," he went on earnestly,
drawing a step nearer to his theme.

"Whose boat was it that went over?"
asked my father, perceiving that but one
man more needed to be accounted for, and
that Sebattis had not mentioned the bow-
man ; he could make a shrewd guess who
was bowman from the way Sebat acted.

BLACK SEBAT 229

Sebattis's face shone, beamed, was
wreathed in smiles ; he just stood and
radiated good nature. " You heard it
'boutdat? Well, by jolly ! "

But Sebattis had been too much the
centre of attention. In some ways a crew
of woodsmen reminds one of a pack of
hounds, good-natured and peaceable fel-
lows, each willing for the others to have
some praise, but wanting his own share,
too, and crowding up to get it. The indi-
vidual feat of running Canaan Falls was sud-
denly side-tracked, and that other more gen-
eral one of getting the Connecticut River
logs into boom was brought to the fore.

"If that drive hadn't 'a' got in, I —
I — I donno ! " said a tall white man with
a pale yellow mustache bristling from a
brick-red countenance, as he gazed out
over the bay and thoughtfully bit off a
large chew from his plug. " And my fare
back all paid — but I — I donno!"

" Oh, I tell you, when we t'ought we
was goin' ben beat we swear jus' lak hell>
s^c-tv-r-r6-damn ! said a Frenchman, a
stranger, who had interestedly worked him-

230 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

self into the inner circle. " But I tell you,
dat John Ross he 's great old boy ; she 's
ben all hung up good, down b'low — b'low
what you call it Hollowyoke ; she 's all
done for, high 'n' dry, an' then she jus'
bias' it out channel and took hees whole
dribe t'rough ! "

That was the fact. At the very time
when, down in Hartford, the loiterers and
gamblers were laying heavy bets that the
drive was a dead failure, John Ross was
blasting out a channel in the waterless
river, and he took his logs through all
right. The men were jubilant. It was their
success. It was a Penobscot triumph. It
meant to them all that a great victory
means to an army, and though they stood
in Boston, on foreign ground, were they
not still the West Branch Drive, the great-
est drive that ever was, the drive that
could n't be beaten ? Pride, pride, pride !
they might try to look stupid, they might
deceive one who did not know them, but
no exultant college crew ever failed more
signally to appear meek before the eyes of
its friends.

BLACK SEBAT

It happened later, when my father had
gone inside for his overcoat and was up-
stairs in the main saloon, that carved and
gilded and Corinthian-columned saloon of
the old Cambridge, that one of the Indians
came strolling through to find him, not
quite steady in his mind nor on his feet, and
yet following as a dog follows a trail that
is familiar. There were ladies and there
were children about, and to the unaccus-
tomed eye Joe looked a little wild ; he was,
moreover, — that is, he could hardly be
called half-seas over, for he was fully two
thirds of the way across the bay ; but when
he caught sight of my father, he grinned
with contentment and came up like a smil-
ing, wagging dog who loves his friends and
can't begin to tell them how much. Joe
wanted to talk. He wanted to talk confi-
dentially. So when he was persuaded to sit
in one of the upholstered chairs, Joe put
an arm about my father's neck and began
in stage whispers which could be heard all
over the saloon. The ladies looked a trifle
perturbed at first, not being used to any-
thing less decorous than a cigar-store In-

232 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

dian, but seeing that no harm came to the
deacon, they soon settled their plumage
and turned observers. Joe talked on, tell-
ing a long story, and hugging my father
tighter and tighter. He was telling the
story of the boat's crew that ran Canaan
Falls. It was a reckless, unheard of, inex-
plicable folly. In time he gave a reason,
good and sufficient, but his first reply was
also memorable.

" What made them do it, Joe ? "

And Joe, eyes shining, beaming wide,
trumpeted in his sepulchral whisper," Well,
you see, Oldtown Injun she's damn
praoud ! "

Just so. There 's no group of slouching
rivermen idling about a corner, with their
hats pulled down over their eyes, but among
them, wherever you find a man good at his
profession, you will find also, if all his faults
were written on his forehead, as the pro-
verb says, that he is " damn proud."

Joe said more. Just because he said
it that afternoon in the saloon of the old
Cambridge, steaming along toward home,
and because it fell into the ear of one who

BLACK SEBAT 233

for eight and twenty years has remembered
it word for word, his comrades, whom every
one condemned for an act of drunken rash-
ness, shall be justified. A man must be in
some way beside himself to be a pure ideal-
ist, just enough the fool or madman to be
above the more immediate tug of self-in-
terest. Even though that release came to
these men by the way of a vice, their virtue
was none the less a virtue. In due place
I shall tell what Joe Orson said.

How came the West Branch Drive off
on the Connecticut River ? Because John
Ross had contracted that year to take down
all the logs on the river, from headwaters
to Hartford. But if there were logs on the
West Branch to be run, why were not the
men who did that the West Branch Drive ?
which is a sensible enough question. Nom-
inally they were ; every drive takes its name
from the river it is made on. Yet in a pe-
culiar way, shared by no other river, the
West Branch Drive was an entity, the pro-
duct of the genius of John Ross. The other
drives were made up of good men, who

234 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

worked by the day ; but the West Branch
Drive was a little army, drilled and com-
manded by a military genius, and its virtues
were preeminently the virtues of fighting
men. For fifty years John Ross worked
on the river, for about thirty he was one of
the heads, when he was not sole head, of
the West Branch Drive, and he trained his
men to a degree of efficiency never known
before. They came to believe that there
was no place on the earth or under it that
the West Branch Drive could not take logs
out of, if John Ross gave the word.

Consequently, the Penobscot man fell
into the sin of pride. He had no dealings
with the Kennebecker ; he scorned the
Machias man ; he made Hfe a burden to
the P. I. Deep down in all of us, like the
ineradicable wildness of a cage-bred wild
beast, lies this fierce, intractable pride of
the River. That is why I have called this
book " The Penobscot Man," because I
know that wheresoever he may be, he is not
going to forget his river. On my first train
journey, as a little child, when we were
riding up the Kennebec, I remember mak-

BLACK SEBAT 235

ing friends with the lady across the aisle,
and explaining to her that I lived on a
river, too, " a great deal bigger and a great
deal nicer river than that river ; mine was
the Penobscot River" — and she, poor
woman, was a Kennebecker ! It is a very
naughty pride, yet how strong it is in the
men who are rivermen ! The poor Ken-
nebecker, years ago, when he used to come
here to work, was the butt of all sorts of
contumeHous jokes. In the days when
our men carried their gear in an old meal-
sack, his enameled cloth or flowery carpet-
bag was dubbed in ridicule a " Kenne-
becker ; " and everything awkward was
laid at the door of the stranger as a "Ken-
nebec swing/' In his wake the P. I. has
suflfered all sorts of reviling, and well for
him when he is either an exceptionally able
man or a very meek one.

" I 'd like to know what there is about
that name ^P. I.,"' said a Western college
man to me. " We had a fellow from down
your way, and we always called him ' P. I.'
— ^P. I. Murchison ' " — or something else.
" It did n't mean a thing to us, but when we

236 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

found it vexed him, we kept it up ; but
what was there in that to get roiled
about ? "

" Why did n't you/' I asked, "call him
Irish, or a Dago, or some soothing term ?
Why needlessly enrage a Penobscot man
by calling him a P. I.? "

Yet, once the men from away are broken
in, there is no more of this rough-carding.
If they are good enough men to belong
to the West Branch Drive, the real meat
and marrow of it, then all distinctions of
race and place are forgotten. There never
was a more democratic organization on
earth : all our head lumbermen have been
bossed first or last by Indian boatmen,
and have started at the foot of the ladder
without favors. All the good men are
Penobscot men. The name stands for
something! Let there be trouble on the
other rivers, let the logs be given up by
the local crews, they would send over for a
hundred or two Penobscot men. Then all
the old West Branchers would enlist, and
march off and clear out that drive — and
everything else they met on the road. Oh,

BLACK SEBAT

the men have told me all about those old
days !

Therefore when John Ross contracted
for the Connecticut River Drive, he took
over all his Maynard boats and a hundred
and fifty of his old men. Plenty of other
men could be had fit to step-and-fetch-it,
plenty of boats good enough for some uses,
but for the solid core of his drive he took
men whom he had trained himself, Yan-
kees, Frenchmen, Indians, Province men,
but all Penobscot. They would follow
John Ross anywhere ; they would do for
him what will never be believed when the
traditions once have faded. He was that
rare creature, the idol of his men. " The
King of the River," I have heard him
called by a college man who had worked
on the logs in vacations and knew of
what he spoke. Nor is his a purely local
reputation. To-day, oflf in the Northwest
among the great logs of Puget Sound, or
down in the Southwest in some mining-
camp or on some cattle ranch, you shall
some day overhear a man who speaks of
"joining drives," or who talks of a "plant"

238 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

as an " operation/' or who promises " to
tend out " on court or a church social. If
you are blunt, you will say, " Hello,
Maine ! " and get a blank denial ; but if
you are subtle in your mind and know
your native tongue, even when meeting it
in unaccustomed places, when you recog-
nize the Penobscot man, let fall casually
to your companion something about John
Ross and what old Jack Mann said to him,
even if you have to make it up out of
whole cloth.

"And where did you ever hear of John
Ross ? says he, hooking himself at your
first cast.

" Where did you ? " you return, the back-
question being the proper Yankee retort.
^'I^m Penobscot" — not "from the Pe-
nobscot," for that would brand you an
impostor, but just the barest phrase, " I 'm
Penobscot."

"So'm I!" he says, which you knew
well enough before ; " what was that you
were saying about John Ross ?" He ends
by inviting you to his house, his mill, his
ranch, his assay office, and the next time

BLACK SEBAT 239

he sights you across a street, he comes
over and begins just where he left off talk-
ing— about John Ross.

We never had but two men who took
hold of the popular imagination in that
way. The first was old General Veazie,
who built one of the first railroads in New
England. Forty years, perhaps, after he
died, I heard a man get up in an ortho-
dox prayer-meeting and say of some char-
acter (whether in the Bible or out of the
Bible I shall not tell), that that man " felt
so big that General Veazie's great-coat
would n't make a vest for him." That
was fame.

Concerning the second, perhaps to-day,
if you are going along the streets of Old-
town, you may see some small boy mount a
pile of lumber and clap his arms and crow,
" Hi-i-yi ! John Ross on a clapboard ! "
or "John Ross on a shingle ! '' or he may
look saucily up into your face and exclaim,
" Say I m John Ross, or I '11 kill you ! "
That, too, is fame! There is no longer
any West Branch Drive ; the Great Com-
pany has seen to that and swept away the

240 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

old organization where friendly rivalry and
fraternal discipline held the men together
in a Round Table of noble and unceasing
adventures. But it will take more than the
Great Company to stop the mouths of the
little boys of Oldtown. Fifty years from
now, — just as to-day, under the name of
Pope Night, the children of Portsmouth,
New Hampshire, celebrate Guy Fawkes'
Day, the children being the great con-
servers of old tradition, — fifty years from
now, and very likely more, you will hear
the little boys of Oldtown crying out,
"Say I 'm John Ross, or Til kill you!"
And that will be fame !

So much of exposition of how we came
to have the sin of pride ; by way of illus-
tration we have Sebattis Solomon. Sebattis
could well illustrate several other sins,
though it will be by his virtues that he is
remembered. In trying to make clear what
Sebat was like, no illustration seems so apt
as that of an old-fashioned home-made
rubber ball, the centre of pure rubber,
tough as gristle, wound hard with home-
spun yarn, a thread of white and a thread

BLACK SEBAT 241

of black, but so commingled that without
unwinding the whole no man might tell
how much of it was black and how much
was white, and so endowed with resilience
that the harder it was hit the higher it
bounced. You could no more keep Sebat-
tis Solomon down than you could keep
down one of those round-ended rubber
dolls that bob up from all positions and
balance anywhere.

What a quaint dignity he had, priding
itself in all sorts of unexpected places !
Once my father was remonstrating with
him for being drunk. They were the best
of friends, but Sebattis stiffened immedi-
ately. " Must n' you said dat, Manry !
he commanded. " Must n' you nebber said
Sebattis Solomon she 's drunk ! 'Cause you
see, she cant be done ! "

Pride at times became a childlike vanity,
as when he got his employer to write a
letter which contained nothing but the
news, four times repeated, that Sebattis
Solomon was driving four white horses.
" You got it dat wrote down ? Well, den
you told him ' Sebattis Solomon she 's

242 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

dribe it four white horses/ " Immediately
came the question again, " You got it dat
wrote down ? Well, we want for tell it
how Sebattis Solomon she 's dribin' four
white horses/'

Yet for some notable feat of skill or
endurance he would refuse both thanks
and pay. Once when the drive was at
Northeast Carry and some article of ne-
cessity was desired at once which could not
be procured nearer than Greenville, Sebat
took a heavy canoe upon his head and ran
across the carry two miles and twenty
rods, to Moosehead Lake. There he
threw the canoe into the water and started
out forthwith, late in the afternoon, to
paddle against a heavy wind to Green-
ville, forty miles away. He arrived in the
middle of the night, routed out whoever
could get him what he came for, and set off
at once to paddle back his forty miles,
after which he again lugged his canoe
across the carry, arriving early in the day.
He was a small man, not weighing over a
hundred and twenty, and he had lugged
four miles and more, and paddled eighty.

BLACK SEBAT 243

without rest and almost without food.
What was to pay ? " Oh, she 's 'bout day's
work ; s'pos'n' we call it t'ree dollar."
Herve Kiel's half-holiday and leave to go
and see his wife was princely compensa-
tion to what Sebattis asked.

Sebattis knew well the struggle of two
natures. His notions of right and wrong
were firmly implanted, and in his own way
he tried to live up to them. Once he came
bringing as a gift a crooked knife which
he had made, the blade ground down from
an old file, the handle most elaborately
carved. " You see, she 's 'gainst our prin-
ciples," — (no one loves a long word
better than an Indian,) — " 'gainst our prin-
ciples hunt on Sunday ; took us t'ree Sun-
day afternoons made it dat knife-handle."
We keep it yet in memory of Sebattis.
Alone, all alone in the woods, he was re-
specting his conscientious scruples about
Sabbath-keeping.

It was when he was out among people
that his moral nature was not equal to the
strain. The sins of this world were so
attractive to him. Once he was arguing

244 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

seriously against paying his honest debts.
He had planned a great and varied round
of pleasures, the full circle of a white man's
debauch, with all the buggy-riding he
wanted. " We sorry we cahn' paid you ;
we owed it an' we ought paid it an' we got
money, but we was goin' get drunk jus'
like white man an' have hell of good time,
an' you see dose t'ings she 's berry 'spen-
sive." This time he squandered his money
strictly according to the programme, but at
other times he was not so successful. His
love of fair play was a great disadvantage
to him. After he had planned some sharp
bit of knavishness, for fear he might not
be quite fair about it, he would very likely
go and explain to his unsuspecting victim
his whole intentions and show just how
and when he could best be outwitted. If
his friendly offices against himself were
accepted and his game was blocked, then
apparently no one was so much pleased
about it as Sebattis. "Well, you was
smart ! We did n't t'ought you 'd got it
your money; but you was smart ! "

But one point he never failed in, and

BLACK SEBAT 245

that was in fidelity to his work. I have
known him to stay three weeks at the
stupid task of watching a dam, though
he had nothing to eat but spoiled pork and
flour, and he knew that all the other boys
were oflF having fun on the logs. He was
with all his heart and soul wrapped up in
the welfare of the West Branch Drive, and
he would have broken all the command-
ments seriatim if that would have helped
the logs along. Captain Hilton of Chesun-
cook, between laughter and vexation, was
telling once how Sebat came along "play-
ing big Injun," with a crowd of fellows tag-
ging after to do his commands, and how
he cleaned up the 'Suncook shores in the
interest of P. L. D. " After he was gone
along, you could n't find a paddle nor a
peavey anywhere, unless it was under lock
and key. He could n't read the marks on
them, and he had to keep up his dignity,
so he took no chances. ' She looks like
P. L. D. ; best way you took him, boys.'
He even carried off my big boom anchor
that weighed three hundred. ^ Dat anchor,
she look like P. L. D. ; best way you took

246 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

him.' P. L. D. never lost anything by
Sebattis."

Nor could his other employers have been
greatly dissatisfied. Mr. Dillingham, the
Indian agent, said years ago that Sebat was
trusted more than any other Indian that
he ever knew. Lumbermen would let him
go into the woods in the fall, explore his
own berth of timber, locate his camp and
hovels, build the same, take the whole
charge of some thirty men and ten or a
dozen horses, and bring his brook-drive
down to the main drive, without having a
white man go near him except to settle with
the men. Judged by this, there must have
been some ground for Sebat's sharp dis-
tinction between a man who is drunken and
a competent man who drinks.

Sebat was quick to see a point. John
Ross had a bad jam on at one time, too
bad a jam to send men out upon against
their wishes. " If you want to go out and
break that jam, Sebat, there's a chance to
get your name in the papers," said he.

Sebattis looked at him as sharp as a
cock-sparrow. " What good do dead In-

BLACK SEBAT 247

jun get damn name in papers?" said he.
He knew very well that between the po-
lice-court records and the funeral notices,
there was no room in the papers for an
Indian.

" Sebat," said one of his many employ-
ers, willing to do a good deed for the
world, " you ought n't to swear so. Don't
you know that you won't ever get to hea-
ven if you swear like that ? "

Sebat considered the proposition half a
second, stopping his work to do so. " I
tell you what, Jim ; we goin' give him
hard one ! " Once more it was the Penob-
scot man, self-reliant and quite confident
of arriving.

In this story of running Canaan Falls
there is no sure evidence that Sebattis was
the bowman of the boat ; but another inci-
dent will show well enough that it could
have been no other, — not while he was
in the boat, as we know that he was. The
story is delightfully Sebattis, too.

It was late in the Civil War, when men
were in great demand, high bounties being
offered to substitutes. One day a friend

248 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

said, " Do you know a black little Indian
who calls himself Sebattis Solomon ? "

"I should think I might/' was the reply.
" He has worked in my haying crew for
three years now ; he enlisted only the other
day and went straight off to war."

The other laughed. " Where do you
suppose he got to ? Not to the war at all,
for he did n't enlist. I was in the provost-
marshal's office the other day, and this fel-
low came in, as drunk as an owl, with a
lumberman who had been drafted, and who
offered him eight hundred dollars bounty
to go in his place. He was in his shirt-
sleeves, with a fig-drum on his head for
a hat, and was marching around all ready
to go to war ; the job just suited him. He
said his name was Sebattis Solomon."

" It certainly was ; that is Black Sebat."

" He marched up to the enlisting offi-
cer, and the first thing he said was : ^ We
want 'list. We want for 'list um colonel ! '
That was a pretty literal application of
the principle of room near the top. They
told him that they had no vacancies just
then in that rank, but they could give

BLACK SEBAT 249

him a good place a little lower down, with
the rank of a full private. But he in-
sisted on enlisting as a colonel. ^ We
want for 'list um colonel ! ' That was all
that could be got out of him. He went
off without enlisting at all."

Sebattis, it is plain, had a Penobscot
man's opinion of his own capabilities. He
knew that any man who could drive four
white horses, or handle thirty Penobscot
lumbermen, or take a drive down in the
spring, was perfectly qualified to command
a paltry thousand of counter-jumpers. No,
sir ! It was colonel or nothing ! Not even
that rank of full private and those eight
hundred dollars — a large sum to a man
who has holes in all his pockets — could
break his determination to take nothing
below his deserts. Therefore one has no
hesitancy in saying that he was the bow-
man of that boat which ran Canaan Falls,
because there would have been trouble if
he had not been ; nor that, even if the
intention did not originate with him, as
was most likely, he was the one who sanc-
tioned it. It was like Sebattis Solomon to

250 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

have ideals which he held high and fol-
lowed loyally, even though he got mired
sometimes in the muck of his daily life.

And so, through the return of the
river-drivers triumphant, their idealization
of John Ross, because he always led them
to victory, the dogged faithfulness and
fantastic pride of Black Sebat, we come
back to the Connecticut River again, to
Canaan Falls in the blithe June weather,
when a little farther down the river, how-
ever it may be there, the laurel is white
as snow on the hillsides, and the thrasher
sings and the wood-thrush, and the scarlet
tanager flashes a living coal among the
green of the chestnut-trees.

I never saw the place, know nothing of
it, save as these men told the story, and
repeat that only from the memory of many
years back ; but if it was as they said,
Canaan Falls was a rapid which had never
been run within the memory of man. All
were agreed that it was impossible water.
Just above the falls, where the full summer
strength of the great river was rushing
down, a bridge crossed, a bridge with stone

BLACK SEBAT 251

piers. Behind each pier played an eddy,
and on the lower side of one was a ring-
bolt drilled into the rock. John Ross's
drive was down as far as Hanover, and
one boat's crew waited behind this pier
while two of the men went uptown on an
errand. There were four Indians in the
boat, — Sebattis Solomon, Mitchell Soc
Francis, Sappiel Orson, and Sebattis Clos-
sian. Three out of the four had been
drinking, though which was the fourth
may be left to their intimate friends to de-
termine ; it could not have been Sebattis
Solomon, because he would have resented
the imputation of sobriety quite as quickly
as he did its opposite.

It was snug and comfortable there, and
they gathered in the middle of the boat
and stretched out their big spike-boots ;
perhaps, if the errand was a long one and
the boat dry, they curled down crosswise
amidships, reclining against her flaring
sides, smoking and whittling. There they
sat, hats pulled down or pushed back, —
for who ever saw a river-driver without
his hat at one extreme or the other? —

252 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

and laughed and chatted in Indian, gos-
siping, as Indians love to do, over the
long-winded nothings which they spin out
so attractively. It was fine June weather,
the drive was all right ; no thought now
of those great meadows in Massachu-
setts where the current eats in under one
bank, leaving the other high and dry, nor
of the river's tortuous windings, nor the
Ox-bow, nor the strong water at Titan's
Pier, nor the falls at Holyoke, nor the
shallows below the falls ; they did not
know the river and the "grief" ahead of
them ; they lay and chatted like the bob-
olinks that sang above them in the grassy
banks. Every now and then a step
sounded on the planking of the bridge ;
perhaps a shaking of dust came sifting
down and was filtered in a band of sun-
light, — men's steps, sharp and quick ;
women's steps, short and fussy ; children's
steps, uneven, joyously eager, or loiter-
ing by turns, as they paused or hastened,
fancy-struck. Not all of the steps passed.
Those who stopped to look over the rail
saw beneath the queer sharp-ended boat

BLACK SEBAT

and the four black, rough-looking men,
talking a strange, soft language with liquid
gutturals and pretty circumflexes ; they
saw them whittling in a strange way with
a strange-looking knife, drawing it toward «
them with great precision, and they saw
them also passing from hand to hand a
flat black bottle. The men were drinking
quietly, not enough to incapacitate them,
— which, as Sebattis said, "can't be done."
These men were doing nothing which
they considered reprehensible, and one of
them never drank. There was some joke
on hand about the bottle just then. Se-
battis Solomon had looked into it last, a
little too long, perhaps, for the next man,
holding it up to the light, shook it gently,
as if to make more of what was in it.
And he murmured ruefully in English,
"Seems like them whiskey she 's thun-
derin' few!" Then he passed the empty
flask to the man who did not drink, who
threw it into the river, and they all laughed
softly. They were having as good a time
as a family of muskrats before the white
folks disturbed them.

254 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

For the feet up on the bridge kept up
their rap-tap-tap. More and more of
them came, and they kept stopping. Few
passed, it would seem ; for, looking up,
one saw a line of faces looking down,
straight down upon that boat.

The Indians talked to each other in
Indian, commenting upon the number of
people who were curious to look at an
Indian, as if his place was in a show, and
they chaffed Sebattis Solomon as being fit
for the part of the monkey, turning an
organ-crank in pantomime and pulling an
imaginary string; Sebat was the butt of
all sorts of witticisms.

Then a woman's high voice said, " Ask
them, why don't you? " They heard that.

Then a man hailed them. " What time
are you going to run these falls ? "

" Ugh-hugh! said Black Sebat sharply,
turning to the next man and repeating it in
Indian as if the man could not understand
English. " He says, ^ What time are you
going to run these falls ? ' All these people
are waiting to see us run these falls.''

No direct answer did he make to his

BLACK SEBAT 255

questioner on the bridge, which was an
Indian trait ; but there began an animated
jabber among themselves in their own
tongue. It was the first notion that any
of them had of running Canaan Falls; for
everybody who knew about water knew that
the place could not be run. Some foolish
loiterer, seeing the boat holding there, and
perhaps not even knowing that an eddy
is a good place to wait in, nor how many
men make a boat's crew, nor that water-
men do not commonly risk their lives for
the pleasure of people who know nothing
about logs and water, not caring over-
much for their approval, had started the
rumor that the Indians were going to run
the falls. And already upon the end of
the bridge fell the sharp pat of running
feet coming to see the Indians act in the
melodrama of running Canaan Falls.

It was not that which moved them to
do it ; there was nothing of the purely
spectacular about it ; Joe Orson, when he
told the story, revealed that clearly enough,
for, though at the time he told it he thought
it was himself instead of his brother who

256 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

was in the boat, all the more did what he
say demonstrate, by its avowal of his will-
ingness to have done the same, and his
approval of what was done, that a perfectly
pure and lofty motive impelled them to
the act.

Perhaps the one sober man tried to dis-
suade them ; for he would see that the
foolish report of foolish idlers did not
bind men to risk their lives. But the ideas
of the others were just enough out of focus
to make them loom grandly ; prudence
did not preach to them half so loud as it
would have done an hour before. They
saw larger relations, grander achievements,
the ideal beckoning them ; they felt the
pressure of moral obligation. It is a stage
that comes to an Indian in this condition
with remarkable regularity of recurrence.
He needs just that stimulus to bring all
his powers out of a dual and antagonistic
relation into harmonious working ; for he
is not one man, but two — a white man
and an Indian, and only the finest and the
strongest among them can bridge that gulf
by their own wills.

BLACK SEBAT 257

So they talked rapidly, gesturing and
arguing. Then Sebattis Solomon stood
up in the stern and picked out a course.
Then, while the others found their places,
he ran forward to the bow, cast off the
painter from the ring-bolt, and swung her
to the stream. So they went down into
the white of Canaan Falls.

How they fared I cannot even imagine,
not knowing the place. What sort of wa-
ter it was, too deep, too scanty, too rocky,
too beset with heaving boils, they never
told me. We had few watermen their
equals, yet they could not make the run.
The boat swamped and was wrecked. The
men were thrown out into the swirl and
rush of the water and carried down among
rocks and white boils into the race of the
rapids below. Three were saved, Sebattis
Solomon being pulled in by a man who
ran out and reached a pick-pole to him
as he was being swept past ; he grasped
the extreme tip of it, but such was the
grip of his horny fingers that he held with
one hand in all that current and was drawn
out safe. The man who had the best

258 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

chance of all, who had won through to
safety, and was resting in the eddy behind a
pier of logs below the fall, in attempting to
break through the current and swim ashore,
was caught by the undertow and drowned.

Joe Orson told the story in the saloon
of the old Cambridge, steaming home from
their great Connecticut River Drive, his
eyes very bright, his whisper most impres-
sively aspirate. He was himself in just the
condition to see things large, and no doubt
he interpreted all more truly and even
more dramatically for the slight mistake of
not being able to tell whether he was him-
self or his brother. It held a noble pathos,
too. This was no crack-brained, dare-devil
feat, but an act of the highest devotion.

" You see we had to go. There was
younk man, old man, boy, gal, all sorts
was lookin' right down on us. Oldtown
Injun she got great name for ribber-dribin'.
We mus' go. We knew it was die that
time, but we must n' go back on our
name 1 "

" Both sweet and becoming it is to lay
down one's life for one's country," sings

BLACK SEBAT 259

the stately Roman poet. Four Penobscot
Indians, men who have no country, in the
face of dangers which they fully compre-
hend, cheerfully elect to die for the honor
of the tribe ; and the man who told it
would have done the same ; and all the
others who were there approved it and
would have done the same. The honor
of the tribe, the fame of the West Branch
Drive, the reputation of the Penobscot
man, were the ideals that beckoned them.

Oh, the folly of all self-sacrifice, the
vanity of all things beautiful, the lying
promise of spiritual ends which the cynic
preaches ! " This might have been sold
for much and given to the poor ! " Verily.
Yet when the poor had eaten and drunken
it, what then ? But the precious waste-
fulness, preserved within a book, — how
many are fed from the ambrosia of such a
fair and noble deed !

" But they were drunk when they did
it," cry the modern disciples, indignant at
seeing the virtue of sobriety infracted, "and
that takes away the merit of the act." Yet
remember that the thoughts which came

26o THE PENOBSCOT MAN

then to them were but the reflexes and
enlargements of the thoughts which filled
their sober hours, not something new and
unaccustomed, but what they commonly
concealed, and perhaps could not act out
with full volition. Prudence might have
prevented the actual doing of the deed,
dumbness might have tied Joe Orson's
tongue in telling of it, had they been strictly
temperate ; but in all the thought would
have been there, the impulse would have
been there, the binding force of pride, the
pure ideal of an honorable sacrifice, would
still have been a motive working latently,
even though we had never seen it as an
active force.

What drives logs to market ? Stout
muscle ; strong will ; pure sentiment. Even
here the Ideal has its place.

The gamesters and loiterers about the
hotels in Hartford were laying bets, five
to one, that that fellow from the Penob-
scot would lose his whole drive. A very
quiet stranger in brown was going about
taking up small amounts.

BLACK SEBAT 261

*^Are you a stranger here?" asked a
good-natured man ; " well, then, take a
friend's advice and don't bet against a sure
thing; we have lived on this river some
time, and that drive 's hung up, a dead
loss."

Still the quiet stranger kept right on
taking up small amounts.

A week later came the word that the
drive was safe, down to Springfield, where
it could be towed the rest of the way. Then
the stranger went around settling bills that
brought him in five to one.

" I hate to take money on a sure thing
like this," said he apologetically.

A loser hissed, Cheat ! You knew it !
You knew what we did n't."

The stranger looked at him ; he melted,
— it was a hot day.

" I guess I did know what you did n't,'*
said he very quietly. " I 've seen the West
Branch Drive before — I 'm Penobscot
myself — and I know John Ross."

But there are no such unsatisfactory peo-
ple in the world to talk to as the fine and

262 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

finicky folk who refuse to see by any light
but the fox-fire of their own prejudices.
The man behind the palm-leaf fan was
fast asleep.

IX

RESCUE

A FORGOTTEN story, a nameless hero.

Who the man was no one knows, except
that he was a Spencer. This in no way
distinguishes him ; it is but saying, in other
words, that he was a riverman, and begs
the question of his identity, the Spencers
being not a family, but a tribe. We might
guess that his name was Elijah, and guess
aright most likely ; but this is nothing by
which he could be discriminated, for every
Spencer who was not named something else
was named Elijah.

What sort of a Spencer was he ? That
is just what the story refuses to tell us:
good or bad ; honest or knavish; lettered
or illiterate ; a sober, thrifty, useful citi-
zen, or the most worthless ever spawned
in Argyle, all that we know for a certainty
is that he had in him the right stuff of
heroes. For out of all the rescues that I
ever heard of, this is the one which had in

266 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

it the least of bravado and the most of
determined courage, the one which the man
who started out to make it might have
given up with good excuse at any point,
and yet that he seems never to have thought
of giving up for a moment, but fought
through in the face of incredible obstacles.

His reward? To be forgotten so en-
tirely that no one knows his name. Almost
is the deed itself passed out of memory.
I heard it fifteen years ago from Reed
McPheters, when we were encamped close
by where it happened, and in all the years
since, asking this one and that one who
has spent his life upon the river, I found
no one who knew the tale. It sounded all
straight, they said, but they had never
heard of it, and there were so many Spen-
cers ; they could n't guess which one this
was. I despaired of ever learning more,
when at last I was directed to the brother
of one of the men engaged. He certified
to the main points and added new details.
This is the story, built up from both ac-
counts; it may be accepted as not far from
the facts.

RESCUE

267

It happened up near Fowler's Carry,
where now is the city of Millinocket.
Whose wildest dreams ten years ago would
ever have fabled a modern city springing
up within the fastnesses of that forest?
For more than sixty years, the only house
between Little Schoodic and Chesuncook
had been the Fowler homestead on the
lower end of the carry. There or near by
there, for fifty-four years, up to the year
1884, when they sold it to Charley Powers,
who in turn sold the land to build a city
on, no one but Fowlers had ever lived
on Fowler's Carry. They were pioneers
among a race of pioneers and watermen of
superlative excellence. It did not hurt the
pride of any man to hear it said that, be-
tween the Lower Lakes and Medway, the
Fowler boys could do on the river what no
other men dared to do. Everybody was
free to admit that much. " Those Fowler
boys," as Mrs. McCauslin said to Thoreau
so long ago as 1 846, " are perfect ducks for
the water." As well they might be, brought
up in the woods with no neighbors within
miles, and never a highroad except in win-

268 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

ter but such as was afforded by a wild and
frothing river, rushing down over endless
rapids and falls.

At the time of this story, the two brothers
Frank and John Fowler, with their fami-
lies, were living in the old homestead on
the carry. To understand at all this story,
it is needful to bear in mind the lay of the
land ; for this man Spencer had to swing
around a circle of not less than nine miles
before he could accomplish what he started
out to do, namely to rescue four men
who were in great peril on the Gray Rock
of Island Falls. The difficulty is that
Fowler's, unlike all the other carries of the
West Branch, does not skirt the river-bank,
but is, or was, a cross-country road from
water to water, cutting off a great bend in
the river. To one looking up the river
from the Forks at Medway, it is as if he
held a sickle left-handed, with his thumb
stuck straight out where he grasped the
handle. At the tip of the blade, like a
plum upon the point of the sickle, would
be Quakish Lake ; the curving steel would
be the West Branch of the Penobscot, tear-

RESCUE

269

ing down a rocky course, some hundred
and fifty feet of fall in about four miles ;
the handle, with the knuckles around it,
would be Shad Pond, and the outstretched
thumb would be MilHnocket Stream com-
ing in from the north. Now Fowler's Carry
ran from a point about two miles up Mil-
linocket Stream to a point about a fourth
of a mile below Quakish Lake at the tip
of the sickle. The carry was called two
miles long, which in Maine always means
abundant measure, and yet it was a far
shorter portage than would have been re-
quired in following the river with all its
falls : first, as one leaves Quakish, Rhine's
Pitch of about ten feet ; then Island Falls
of two miles of very strong water with a
heavy Tall, — twenty feet in twenty rods in
one place, — and Grand Falls, a mile long,
with the Grand Pitch, twenty feet perpen-
dicular, just before the river enters Shad
Pond. Fowler's, undoubtedly chosen by
the Indians ages ago as the shortest and best
route from lake to lake, did not go near the
river ; in most places it was from two to
more than three miles away from the river.

270 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

It was the very last day of April, 1867,
when Scott and Rollins turned out their
logs from the boom on Quakish Lake.
Theirs was not the main West Branch
Drive, but a private drive, which got into
Quakish much earlier and was worked
along by a single boat's crew of seven
men. That is why no one knows about
the matter; for if the success of a jest lies in
the ear of the hearer, much more does the
memory of a heroic deed depend upon the
eye of the spectator. But in this case had
there been on-lookers, they never would
have permitted Spencer to do what he did ;
they would have insisted upon helping, and
so would have spoiled the story.

The last of April — seven men working
on the logs at Quakish, one of tliem a
Spencer. One who knows the place and
the season has to stop and think about
what it brings back to him, — crisp air;
freezing nights ; snowdrifts in the shaded
hollows, and patches of dark ice, covered
with hemlock needles, among the black
growth ; the chittering of red squirrels
chasing each other and the pleasant con-

RESCUE

271

versation of chickadees consulting where
to dig their nest. The round-leaved yel-
low violet is out then, even so far north as
that, and the brown-winged Vanessa but-
terfly. How they endure the freezing nights
no one knows, but for weeks now, fuzzy
black-ended brown caterpillars have been
crawling around on the snow. The bees
are nosing about the woodpiles, their
heads close to the sappy ends of the
sticks, and the little flies that dance like
tiny sprites in the golden light of sunset
are treading up and down on air in their
bewildering mazes. Out in the fields the
sheep snifi^ the earth, and the cattle bite
it for a relish ; the ploughed land lies in
furrows, wet and rank to the nostril, a
wholesome smell — for one must remem-
ber again that spring comes late to these
northern clearings. Leaves there would
be none upon the hard wood; but the red
maple might be blossomed like coral and
the poplar beginning to fringe itself with
silvery tassels, while birch and alder showed
their corded catkins of twisted bullion and
the " pussies on the willows were large

272 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

enough fairly to be called " cats," and were
alive with bees. The squaw-bush ' would
have lost something of the scarlet lacquer
of its stems, and the big marsh willows
would be less golden in their twigs. Al-
ready the partridges would have quit their
diet of birch and poplar buds and be feed-
ing on the shrubby willows in the lowlands,
or foraging for the green leaves of last
year's clover and goldthread. Already the
fish-hawk would be at work at Shad Pond,
carrying sticks to repair his family home-
stead, while up at Quakish, his natural
enemy and bully, the great bald eagle,
might be whiling away his idle time in
honest fishing from his old station on a
boomstick.

One never knows the idyllic charm of
our northern woods who has not seen them
in April, when it is all a feast of birds and
buds and waking life. Midsummer does
not compare with this. This month be-
longs to the birds and flowers ; but most of
all to the robin. I cannot tell this story

I A local name for the Cornus stolonifera, red-osier
dogwood.

RESCUE

273

without giving the robins the place which I
know they must have had in it, — great
husky fellows, as red as blood in the lifting
between showers that made a golden sunset,
sitting high in the treetops and splitting
their throats with their rain-carol, singing in
jubilance at being back again, glad to find
once more the corner of the earth that they
were born in, and trolling forth such lusty
music that all* their pertness and swagger
and pilfering of a later date is forgiven in
advance. Of all the birds of springtime,
I would like best to be the robin just get-
ting back to his old home ; for it is brave
and blithe and bonny that he is, and he is
April to all of us in the far north.

So here there must have been robins,
cheerful in the face of all weathers, singing
their best when the skies are lowering and
the mist drives down the lake. For what-
ever may be the joys of April at its loveli-
est, it would seem that this was a bad one.
There are evidences in the story that much
rain had fallen and was still falling, else why
such a rapid rise of water after the most of
the snow was gone and the river should have

274 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

been quieting down to the ordinary driving-
pitch? Quakish, then, instead of a sapphire
lake girdled with the green of spruces, must
have been gray and mist-enshrouded, the
nights warmer than on fairer days, and the
days alternations of misty sunshine and
smart showers of finely sifted rain, — a
whole week of wet weather that melted the
snows in the woods, that overfilled the bogs,
that left all the mosses gree*n and spongy,
overflowing in little streams which trickled
down all the tiny runlets, and that dripped
from the mossy cedars leaning out over
Quakish, funereally draped in gray-green
moss, — good weather enough for robins,
who love the wet, but not such good wea-
ther for men driving logs.

The trouble, so Reed said, was in turn-
ing the logs out of the boom in Quakish
too early. Just what that means is doubt-
ful, if it does not imply long-continued rain,
which would swell the river rapidly and
make the work of driving the logs more dif-
ficult and dangerous than ordinary. What-
ever it means, the very first thing, they
got a jam on the old Gray Rock just below

RESCUE

275

Rhine's Pitch and about a quarter of a mile
above the head of Island Falls. It was a
middle-jam, which is the worst to pick, and
they had only a single boat's crew to take
care of it. Scott, who was one of the head
men of that drive, went down to Fowler's
at the lower end of the carry at once, and
offered the two brothers, John and Frank,
fifteen dollars a day to go up and handle
boats and do general work. That was the
first day of May, and that very day Frank
Fowler had gone up to Big Smith Brook
to work for Fowler and Lynch. We hear
no more of Scott in this story ; it seems
likely that, without going back to his men
at all, he hastened out to Medway, twelve
miles away, to pick up a crew there, and
that he did not get back again till the story
was over.

Meantime there were but seven men to
look after that jam and whatever logs of
theirs were running free. They had but
their one boat, which it would never do
to risk, and so they must have worked
short-handed, some on the jam, the rest
along the shore keeping the boat by them,

276 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

ready to rescue the others if anything hap-
pened. The water must have been terribly
rough then, and one who knows what to
listen for in imagination can hear the hiss of
the great boils and the bursting of the bub-
bles in the long white foam-streaks striping
the waves which went rushing past, running
deep and wicked. Out there in the scuds
of rain, one who knows what to see can see
once more the piled-up middle-jam and the
four men upon it, red shirts and peavies,
pulling and prying and pushing to loosen
one by one the great jackstraws under
their feet and send them darting down the
rushing river, — precarious work, this, to
pry out the foundations under your feet
when you know that there is nothing be-
neath but water running at a race-horse
rate, and below, two miles of dangerous
falls.

How long the men had been working
on that jam, why Spencer and the others
started to take them off, at what time of
day the catastrophe happened, neither
account satisfactorily determines. Reed
understood that the jam hauled suddenly.

RESCUE

277

and left only about twenty logs upon the
rock, with the four men on them. Frank
Fowler, who should know if any man does,
says otherwise, that the jam did not start
till some time in the night. Even without
the authority of his statement, this would
be the better reason ; for the former sit-
uation is too thrilling by half for a real
event, and instead of urging Spencer on to
such desperate efforts would, by making
it hopeless from the start, have left him
nothing to labor for. It seems most prob-
able that the larger half of the crew had
been working on this jam since Scott left
them the day before (for it is now the
second day of May, 1867), other three
resting or working near the boat, to be
ready in case of accident ; that the time
must have been not far from six o'clock,
the old-fashioned sun-time, which came a
half hour later by the light than the rail-
road standard of to-day ; and that it was
now approaching supper-time, and the boat
was coming out to take the men off. For
it could not have been dark enough to quit
work at that season, even of a lowery or a

278 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

rainy day ; but the river-driver's supper
hour is seven o'clock, and as these were
but a single boat's crev^, too ftw men to
carry a cook and separate wangan, they
must leave the logs long enough before
dark to cook for themselves. It seems
likely that it was, as the men would say,
"just about half-past hungry time," and
the men on the jam saw with pleasure the
boat, with Spaulding, Moores, and Spencer
in it, dropping down to take them off.
Perhaps the rain held up a little and the
yellow of the sunset behind the rain-cloud
showed through it, and the robins in the
treetops all along the shore were singing,
to be seen but not to be heard above the
tumult of the water.

" Pretty birds them be to sing," the
men might have remarked, leaning on
their peavies, " and awful nice in pies."
It may sound materialistic, but why is it
not better that a robin should be good
in a pie as well as out of it ? They were
willing enough to give him credit for
his music, but supper was what was in
their thoughts. And here were Spaulding

RESCUE

279

and Moores and Spencer letting the boat
down, two with their poles, one at the
oars, intending to drop her into the eddy
below the jam. Then the four men would
tumble in, three of them would take an
oar apiece, the boy would sit aft on the
lazy seat, and back they would go to camp-
fire, supper, and bed.

Two of those men were doomed to
make their bed in a different place that
night ; and but for a miracle, the like of
which I never heard of happening, all seven
of them would have been there before
morning.

It was but a step more to safety in the
eddy, when snap went the stern-pole, and
around the boat swung broadside to the
current. Before they could straighten her
with paddles she was swept down upon the
head of Island Falls. She struck a rock,
cracked open, and overset, all in the same
instant. Quick ? A driving-boat is built
to act quick ; that is her special virtue.

There were now three men and a wrecked
boat in the water of Island Falls, and four
men on a jam in the middle of the river.

28o THE PENOBSCOT MAN

powerless to save them. If the initial dis-
aster was quick, the final one was to the
spectators a prolonged agony. Two of
their mates they saw drowned outright,
and for the third there was no hope. There
were they, four wet, hungry, shivering
men, a moment before so near to blan-
kets, supper, and fire, now abjectly mis-
erable on a log-jam in mid-river, no one
knowing of their plight, rain falling, night
coming fast, the river rising, the jam they
were on already beginning to feel the
freshet and grow uneasy, their own danger
imminent, and their hearts wrung by seeing
a catastrophe which they could have in no
.wise prevented. They were hungry, cold,
wet, miserable, disheartened men, in peril
of their lives. Did the robin still sing
in the treetops? Then they damned his
unseemly levity, and in the same breath
wished they had the pie he was made for.

Two men were drowned outright, and
so have nothing further to do with the
story. No doubt they were as good men
as any of those saved, as good watermen.

RESCUE

281

perhaps, as Spencer was ; but it was their
fate to lose their lives, not to give them
away. Moores was found about a month
later down at Jerry Brook, and there was
buried. Spaulding was not discovered till
some time in September, under a log
where the old mill-pond was, down at Med-
way, sixteen miles below where he was
drowned. *T is only a sample of what all
river-stories are like ; in almost all some
one loses his life, and no one thinks of
him afterward except the family, that sets
one less chair at table, and a few mates
here and there, who date their stories by
the year such and such an one was
drowned.

Meantime Spencer, on whom every-
thing depends, is at the mercy of a raging
flood on the head of Island Falls. There
are two miles of this tumultuous water,
but the River helped him. All watermen
know — indeed, any one may observe the
same thing by watching even a gutter-
current — that all swift water has a pulse-
beat ; nominally its waves are stationary.

282 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

but every now and then there comes a
larger one, swelling quick and high with
a sudden throb, quite different from the
ordinary stationary wave. No sooner had
Spencer been thrown into the water than
one of these great waves took him and
lifted him fairly up on the bottom of his
overturned boat. It was slippery with wet
pitch ; it was narrow ; it had no keel ; he
could not have held on at all, bucking and
rearing as it did, reeling and rocking, as
its long points, bow and stern, ploughed
under the great boils, had not the boat
when she turned over hit a rock so hard
as to split one side open. He got his
fingers into the crack, and it nipped them
there.

We have four men on a middle-jam
waiting to be drowned, two below drowned
already, and the seventh man with his
fingers caught fast in the crack in a crazy
old boat that — upside down, banging into
him, overriding him, slatting him against
rocks and logs, half drowned with spray
and rushing waters, half stunned with
being beaten against boat and rocks, his

RESCUE

283

fingers crushed and aching cruelly —
towed him the whole two miles down
Island Falls. " And if that wasn't some-
thing of an experunce, then I don't never
want to have one happen to me ! " says
the woodsman, who can appreciate better
than any amateur what it must mean.

It takes a good deal to drown a Spencer.
There is a story current about four Spen-
cers and four Province men, a Matta-
wamkeag crew, going out in 1870 to pick
a jam on the upper pitch of Piscataquis
Falls. When they saw how bad the water
was, two of the Spencers leaped out of
the boat and got ashore again ; the other
two Spencers and the Province men were
carried over the falls. The Spencers were
all right in the water, of course ; they ex-
pected to arrive somewhere. Old Lute
swam ashore about half a mile below, with
his T. D. pipe still in his teeth. He
emerged like Neptune, and shook the
water off all ready for some more river-
driving. Some bystander, a little curious,
inquired where he had come from. He
answered that he was right down from

284 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

Piscataquis Upper Pitch, and he guessed
them four Bluenoses that was in the boat
with him was all drownded by that time ! "
He was right, too. The Spencer whom
he did not worry about got ashore on the
boat.

This Spencer was dragged down through
Island Falls. Just as he reached the point
where he did not care to travel much farther
because below were the Grand Falls and
Grand Pitch, which nothing can go over
and live, the boat struck a wing-jam so
hard that the crack gaped and let his fin-
gers out. Then the boat went oflF and left
him ; for all this time the boat had been
holding him rather than he holding the
boat. As he was being carried past the
jam, he threw one arm over a log, and an-
other of those great pulse-beats of the river
came, as before, and lifted him clear up
upon the jam. Reed had heard that at just
this moment the jam hauled, that he fell
in between the logs as they were moving,
grasped two of them, threw himself out
upon them, and ran ashore over the tum-
bling, moving mass. This is requiring too

RESCUE

285

much breath for even a Spencer. Any
man, after being dragged through Island
Falls the way this one had been, ought to
have been grateful enough for the help of
that great wave to lie there on the logs,
sick and giddy and aching, till he got the
water out of him and the woods stopped
spinning around him, the noise of the river
became a less deafening roar, and he could
see the trees and logs in their natural color
instead of just the black shapes of logs and
trees.

It was getting quite dusk beneath the
trees, and here was he, a battered and dis-
abled man, alone on the river-bank, two
miles below his comrades in distress and
four miles at least from Fowler's, nothing
for him to do but to get his legs under him
and limp along the best he could to Fowler's
Carry. John and Frank would go up and
take the men off, and all would come out
right.

The water was very strong ; it was rising
fast ; to lose a moment would not do, for
no one could tell how soon, under such a
pressure as that, the jam on the Gray Rock

286 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

might give way. He scrambled up, hob-
bling painfully, perhaps putting his fin-
gers to his mouth to ease them, for they
were raw and bloody and still white at the
ends from the pinching they had received
in the old boat's side ; the split board
working back and forth had maimed them
cruelly. Then he set off down the driv-
ers' path past Grand Falls. There was a
boat down below the Grand Pitch, and it
was easier, if not shorter, to go by water
than to go through the woods, if, indeed
he was landed on the left bank at all, which
the story does not say. He walked and
he ran and he hurried hobbling for a mile,
when he reached the place where the boat
was. Then he rowed down Shad Pond
for a mile, and then poled up Millinocket
Stream for two miles more. It must have
taken him an hour at least since he was
washed ashore below Island Falls, and it
was now on the edge of darkness, the time
when the robins are flying with sharp peeps
and queepSy jetting their tails and talking
about going to bed, for the robin is rather
late about his hour of retiring.

*

RESCUE 287

At Fowler's landing Spencer hauled
his boat up ashore enough to hold her,
and then toiled up the hill to the house.
He was very much done out. However,
he could get the Fowler boys to go over
with their boat, and he would have no
more worries. He was hungry, too. A
woodsman's appetite is not a fickle fancy
for victuals, to be lost or forgotten just
because he has had some strain upon his
nerves. Perhaps, as he dragged himself
wearily up the hill in the dusk, he smelled
that most appetizing of all the smells of
springtime, the odor of smoked alewives
roasting before an open fire. He could
see in fancy the row of golden-sided fishes,
standing on their heads before the bed of
coals, as they leaned against the tongs laid
across the fire-dogs and gave forth, when
they cracked open, a smell so savory that
no one who cannot remember smelling it
in damp April weather can dream how
good it is. Spencer quickened his steps,
always supposing that he actually did smell
it, for, where the story is silent, conjecture
has the right to wander.

288 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

He went up to the log-house, finished
within and without with rifted cedar, and
appeared before the women within like an
apparition. It was long after supper; they
were finishing the last of the supper-dishes,
and the delicious odor was only from the
refuse of the feast smouldering upon the
coals. He was disappointed, more so than
he would have cared to own. He had been
planning on being asked to supper, and had
anticipated his enjoyment of his share.

" Where 's John and Frank ? he asked
abruptly, stopping in the doorway, a big,
black bulk in the gloaming.

" Lord ! how you scared me ! " cried one
of the women.

" Did n't mean to, mum," was his weak
apology, leaning against the door-jamb ;
he knew that he was faint as well as hun-
gry. " Where 's John and Frank ? "

" Milking,'' said John's wife.

" Up Big Smith Brook ; went up yes-
terday," said Frank's wife, each one an-
swering for her own.

He dropped into a seat with a groan.

" Why, what 's the matter ? " asked one

RESCUE

289

of the women kindly. " You do look all
beat out ! No hat, and — land sakes !
you're wet to the skin! Here, draw up
close to the fire and get het up. What
have you been doing of? "

Whether she had ever seen him before
made no difference, the cordiality of those
pioneer homes being too real for any for-
mality. She drew him up to the fire and
bade him rest, " What's the matter now ? "
she asked. There was always something
the matter on those falls.

"Just ben runnin' Island Falls on the
bottom of a boat," said he. His fingers
almost made him wince when he got them
near the fire.

She was a pioneer woman, and could
think and act promptly. " Here, Billy and
Ann," — or whatever were the names of
the first children she could catch, — "just
you run out to the barn and tell your
father to come right in ; there 's been a
boat swamped up on Island Falls."

" What become of the others ? " she
asked, turning to the man.

He did not Hke to say it too bluntly.

290 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

" They 're where they won't get out till
they are taken out, I guess, mum," he
answered.

She stood and plaited the hem of her
apron. " How many ? she asked.

" Two — there was three of us in the
boat. The other four 's out on the jam on
the old Gray Rock, if so be she ain't hauled
yet."

The other woman had stood silent be-
side her sister-in-law. " And only you
and John to do it ; and you so used up !
How can you ever ? "

" Got to," said he.

There is never any fun in being a hero.
This man did n't look the hero either, just
a worn-out, tired, used-up man, with hair
all tossed and tangled, a stoop in his shoul-
ders, a crook in his back, and every rag
upon him steaming before the fire. His
hands he held down between his knees ;
he did not wish to .have the ladies see
them ; they were not presentable.

These were women who knew what to
do for a man. Already one of them had
poured hot water on fresh tea leaves, while

RESCUE

291

the other stooped and stood a herring up
against the andiron bar, close to the coals.

"You ought not to, mum," said the
man ; " I ain't got time to eat ; we Ve got
to git right off ; there ain't no time to eat/'
It was a feeble remonstrance. He wanted
that alewife ; the sight of it put more heart
into him than anything else could have
done, and to sit and sip his tea and watch
that broil would, he felt, make a new man
of him.

" You 've got plenty enough time to
eat," said one of the sisters-in-law, both
hospitably busy with laying plates and tea-
things and bringing out the food in store.
" It 's too bad you are too late for regular
supper ; things don't taste so good cold,
but we '11 warm up the biscuit, if you don't
mind them a little crusty." No doubt the
table was spread with other seasonable
food: cold buckwheat cakes, perhaps, with
the richest and sweetest of maple syrup,
made from their own trees, and spicy dried-
apple sauce, as brown as mahogany, fla-
vored with nutmeg and dried orange peel,
a delicious spring dainty, or custard pie

292 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

without stint of eggs, and thick, soft gin-
gerbread, such as woodsmen love best of
anything, — "the odds and ends," as no
doubt the ladies said, but food enough and
good enough for any one; for these frontier
homes were places where there was no lack
of good fare, and where no one was allowed
to pass without the invitation to partake it.

"Just you rest easy," said the sisters,
caring for him. "John has got the boat to
see to, and to get the drag down to it, and
to yoke up the oxen. You can't help a bit
more than the children can till it comes
to getting the boat on ; then maybe it will
take the whole of us, she 's so big and
heavy. You wait till you are called for and
get rested ; you '11 need all the strength
you Ve got when the time comes." So well
did they perform their part, that before the
boat was ready he was fit to do his share
in helping John Fowler.

Meantime John Fowler was losing no
minutes. He understood what his wife
meant when he had come in with the foam-
ing milk-pails and she had laid her hand
upon his arm. It was: Must you go,

RESCUE

293

John ? " — not dissuasion, but wifely con-
cern.

All he said — for he knew that it meant
some desperate undertaking — was, " How
many? Where are they? "

A rescue is an obligation on all river-
men. While a chance remains it is not
to be given up, no matter what it costs.
"Drown ten men to save two,'' is the
unwritten code of the River. The way in
which this has been lived up to is one of
the explanations of the willingness of the
men to go into all sorts of hard places :
they know that if human skill can do
it, they are to be saved. Once when two
men were adrift on the logs at Piscataquis
Lower Pitch, six boats' crews, thirty-six
men in all, leaped into their boats and ran
the falls to save those two. It was mad
folly for them to do it all at once, for the
water was terribly rough ; but they did it.
Sebattis Solomon, good waterman as he
was, almost lost his life in the attempt ;
for a leaping log knocked him out of his
place in the bow, and had he not come up
like a cork and thrown himself into his

294 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

boat before his own midshipmen knew
that he was out of it, he would not have
Hved to perform more deeds of water-craft.

This rescue on Island Falls was one of
peculiar difficulty ; for it must be made
long after dark, in the worst of water, with
only two men to handle a great Maynard
boat whose crew should have been six men,
four at the least. It required the most
careful preparation for all emergencies.
Everything must be provided at the out-
set. There were poles and paddles to be
put into the boat, an axe, a rope, perhaps
some dry kindling for starting big bonfires
along the shores to light up the river ; and
there must be torches of birch-bark wound
on slender poles to stick up in the boat,
lighting more fully the track by which she
traveled. Then the boat was too large and
heavy for two men to launch, so rollers
must be provided, that the pitch might not
be scraped off on the rocks in getting her
afloat. Then everything within the boat
must be lashed in place, that on the rough
trip across the carry nothing essential
should be lost out. Finally, John Fowler

RESCUE

295

must get on his driving-boots and must
hitch up the cattle. Last of all, when the
drag was ready and Spencer stood beside it
with two of the children, one carrying a
lantern, it now being full dark, John Fow-
ler had to go back again to get a little
bottle of matches, perhaps to say good-by
to his wife. To every one else those men
seemed the same as saved already because
he had started to do it, but he and she
might have felt the flutter of uncertainty.

So, with the children leading, to light the
road with the lantern, to tend the fires,
and, if accident were to be piled upon acci-
dent that day, as sometimes happens, to
bring back home the news of it, they set
off up the hill and across the rocky pas-
ture now growing up to pine bushes, with
the oxen going at as brisk a pace as was
good for either boat or cattle. Ahead
the children danced and trotted, their
swinging lantern a mere blur upon the
misty night. Then came the oxen on the
run, John Fowler giving them the gad,
while Spencer tried to keep the boat up-
right. The old drag smashed and bounced

296 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

on the great gray rocks embedded in the
carry road, the boat was tossed more ways
than if she were running the roughest water,
and in spite of their lashings, the things
inside her clattered and clashed. There
was the jangling of chains, the shouting to
the cattle, the creak of drag and boat, the
rattle of the gad on horns and yoke, the
racket of the poles inside the boat as they
urged that cavalcade along, not sparing
their speed. It was two miles to go, over
as rough a road as a man cares to walk by
daylight unencumbered, and then the off-
set down to Rhine's Pitch. Half an hour ?
Well, if they did it in half an hour, that
was quick time ; the miles in that region
are good measure, and the bounces and
jounces are thrown in besides.

Meantime there had been four men sit-
ting on a jam out in the middle of the
river. Nothing more is known about
them. Being merely dummies in the story,
whose whole office was to permit them-
selves to be rescued, no one has thought
to preserve their names. Nor would they

RESCUE

297

care themselves if we invent whom we will
to take their places.

There were, let us say, a boy of eigh-
teen, off on his first drive, qualifying for the
West Branch ; an old soldier who would
have " seen her through," had not a minie
ball through the lungs mustered him out
at Gettysburg, — a lean, gaunt man, always
chirk and active, with a straggling, thin
beard, the type of many a veteran whom
we used to see when the war was over; and
there was Tom Smith of Oldtown, which
is no libel, for it used to be reported
of the Tom Smiths of Oldtown that they
named them Long Tom and Short Tom
and Chub Tom, and then they began and
numbered them, and they numbered them
up to sixteen. This one was Tom Smith
number sixteen and a half, the beginning
of a new series of Tom Smiths, and not
at all a bad sort of fellow ; he was prob-
ably dark, with curly hair, and having
been brought up in Oldtown, had never
believed that it was going to be his luck to
be drowned. The last was a short, thick-
set, swarthy man, part Inman, who sat

298 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

silent and smoked. He had nothing to
say ; he did nothing ; he seemed to have
no nerves ; but in a nook as well protected
as any from the drive of the rain and the
spray of the river, he sat with his hands
in his pockets and pulled at his old pipe,
facing death without the quickening of
a pulse beat. That was partly because he
was a man approaching middle-age, who
had been on the river long enough to learn
that if a man is born to be drowned, a
mud-puddle in the road is deep enough
to do it, and if he is n't born to be drowned,
the whole Penobscot River cannot keep
him under long enough to save him from
his natural fate; so there is no use in wor-
rying over what is going to happen to you,
even if you do find yourself in a tight place.
That is the philosophy of the River. All
brave men are fatalistic ; the only objection
to fatalism is when it is stupid.

But it is no comfortable situation to
be where these men were, in a night of
rain and mist, out on a pile of logs with the
river rushing on all sides, so that it makes
one giddy to see the white streaks racing

RESCUE

past, like looking out of a train window
in the dark at the lane of light which trav-
els beside it, — to be there without fire
or food or extra garments, and from hard
and heating labor suddenly to have to sit
down in a cold spring rain and wait for
hours, with nothing to think of but the
uncertainty of their fate and the horror
of what they had seen. The boy took it
hard ; silently, of course, for stoicism is
the custom of the river, and no one here
likes to admit that he has any feelings ; but
this was the first time he had ever seen
any one drown, and horror of it shook his
nerves, and made the night seem full of
noises ; he was twice as chilly as he had
been, his teeth chattered, and he did not
like an old horned owl which kept hoot-
ing along the river-bank, audible above
the rushing of the water.

What had become of Spencer, they did
not know. They had seen him thrown up
on the boat by the great wave ; he stood a
chance, that was all. If he were lost, they
were doomed. It was only a question of
time before that jam would be carried away

300 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

by the rising water. Tom Smith took out
his pocket-knife, and reaching down among
the logs, began cutting into the side of
one. It was not dark then, only full dusk,
and the rain had given way to mist.

" What doing, Tom ? " asked the sol-
dier.

" Getting spruce gum," replied Tom
Smith.

But the man who asked the question
was not deceived : one does not look for
much spruce gum on a pine log; Tom
Smith had been cutting a water-line where
he could feel it after dark with his fingers,
and judge by the rising of the water when
that jam would haul. Then he shut his
knife, and put it in his pocket.

" Find any gum, Tom ? " inquired the
ex-soldier.

" Nothin' good for anything," replied
Tom Smith ; " that log was all rossy '
anyway." Then he went dumb again.

^, Rossy, a very old word, used of shaggy -barked
trees, chiefly of hard wood trees, like swamp maple; but
sometimes also of scurfy or scaly barked soft woods. It
applies only to the loose, outside bark, which is often
called ross.

RESCUE

301

The ex-soldier understood the situation.
He had the boy on his mind, too ; for he
had seen enough of raw recruits under
fire for the first time, and he did not
believe that it helps a man's after-career
to let his courage sink too low the first
time he is facing peril. One has to see
men die more or less, was his notion, and
the right thing to do is to think that it
is not at all unnatural : it does not follow
that one's own turn is coming next. He
began telling stories, funny stories, of times
when there was nothing to eat and some
one sneaked off with the best of the gen-
eral's dinner, and his mess that day fared
all right ; of times when in hard places
men were supremely comical and kept the
others laughing with their drollery ; of
times when men did such great things
that only to hear of them was to applaud,

— stories like that of Major Hyde and
the Seventh at Antietam, and of Chamber-
lain at Little Round Top. He had been

— where had he not been? — at First
Bull Run, at Williamsburg, Chickahom-
iny, Fair Oaks, Antietam, Fredericksburg,

302 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

Chancellorsville, Gettysburg. At Gettys-
burg he saw — and then he stopped to
cough.

" Quite a cough," said Tom Smith.

" Keeping that to remember Gettysburg
by/' replied the veteran, wiping his fore-
head; " sometimes when I 'm damp it comes
on a little to 'mind me of old times."

It did not sound like a cough which
river-driving would help to cure ; but in
that gaunt, thin-faced man with the strag-
gling beard there was a power of grit. Just
at present, instead of fretting because he
could not get hot tea and warm blankets, he
was taking upon himself to be the life of
the little group upon the old Gray Rock.

" Oh, cheer up, sonny," said he to the
boy ; " don't you take it to heart so much ;
like 's not they are all snug somewheres ;
takes a deal of killing to use a man up,
especially an able man at his trade. They '11
all come hypering back bime-by when
they get 'em another boat ; you would n't
believe what a man can go through and
not be hurt a bit ; why, I knowed a
man " —

RESCUE 303

Meantime Tom Smith was consulting
his water-line.

" Gettin' some more of that same kind
o' gum ? " asked the soldier.

" Yes," said Smith gloomily. His line
was half an inch under water in about
an hour, he calculated. At that rate the
jam could not hold together till morning.
Three inches more, he reckoned, and she
would haul. Already the water sobbed
and chuckled higher among the timbers,
and one of the big pulses of the river would
send it spouting up through the chinks
in the centre of the mass where before
the water had been almost still. The jam
lifted around the edges, too, when one of
these big fellows came hurrying past. Of
course there are plenty of youths who never
saw anything but a millpond, who will be
assured that, had they been there, they
would just have caught hold of the big-
gest log they could find and have serenely
floated down to safety : it would n't have
worried them any, because they always can
see easy ways out of sinking ships and
burning buildings and dangers which they

304 THE PE*NOBSCOT MAN

never experienced. To such a riverman
would reply : " Our boys ain't onto them
smart tricks o' yourn with logs, but when
you try to Tarn us how, don't start in on a
middle-jam on Island Falls." Tom Smith
and the others who were used to the busi-
ness saw nothing to do but to wait for the
end of things right where they were.

" Just the same sort of gum as before ? "
the old soldier had bantered, trying to get
his information lightly.

" And it ain't no good sort, I can tell
you," responded Tom Smith bitterly.

The old horned owl on the shore
whooped again.

" Blame a owl ! " said Tom Smith.

The soldier kept right along with his
story, " the awfuliest comical story that
ever was about a man that got his head
shot clean off ; something I seen myself."

His stories had more to do with sudden
death than some would think in keeping
with their surroundings ; but all tales of
the river are tragic. These men did not
mind mere tragedy. Under their environ-
ment, to talk of drowning would not have

RESCUE

305

been etiquette, but there was something
almost cheerful in hearing about a man
to whom nothing worse happened than
getting his head cut clean off with a can-
non-ball.

The horned owl hooted again.

" Darn — a — owl I " said Tom Smith,
in so ladylike a way that it took off all the
objections to strong language. He had to
say something. He did not like the hollow
mockery of that great voice in the dark
that cried, " Oh, who, who, who are you ? "
He was n't going to be anybody by to-
morrow morning, if Spencer had been
drowned with the rest and that water kept
on rising half an inch or more an hour ; he
did not care to be reminded of the fact.

The ex-soldier coughed again, a rack-
ing spasm of coughing. River-driving in
rainstorms and fitting out all night on
middle-jams did not seem to be the sort of
health-cure best adapted to a man who has
had a minie ball through his lungs. Yet as
soon as he could take his hands away from
his side where he had pressed them, he
began talking again, telling how he once

3o6 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

made three men prisoners when he had
nothing but an empty rifle ; how when he
was a vidette he used to trade tobacco with
the enemy's outposts ; how that first day
at Gettysburg, the day before he got this^
an old fellow in a high-crowned hat and
a long-tailed blue had fought all day
with the Seventh Wisconsin, and was a
blame good shot, too ; how at Yorktown,
Old Seth of the Berdan Sharpshooters had
captured one of the enemy's largest guns,
and declared that if they would only bring
him victuals enough, he could keep that
gun till the end of the game, because not
a man could get near to serve it while he
had his bead on them. The man had seen
life for three years, and there rose in him
such a fountain of unquenchable vitality
that no vicissitude nor danger could make
him feel that he was not going to keep
right on living; drown him on Island
Falls if need be, and he would turn up
somewhere else all alive and kicking, just
as when they killed him in the army he
had come out a river-driver. He did not
worry about that cough even.

RESCUE

307

" Sometimes coughin' won't kill ye half
so quick as ye wisht it would/' was his
cheerful philosophy.

"This old jam is heavin' now/' cried
the boy, clutching his arm.

" Don't ye be 'feared o' that, sonny,"
said he, as cool as ever ; " you 've ben get-
tin' the water in your head, hearin' the rush
of it so long ; it 's just makin' you dizzy
to see them white streaks racin' past ;
you '11 feel a big ram-dazzlefication when
this here raft pulls ofF'n the old Gray.
When I was sharpshootin' down in " —

The old horned owl hooted again sepul-
chrally and near : " Oh, who, who, who are
your

" Damn a hoot-owl ! " cried Tom Smith,
not mincing matters. A loon and a hoot-
owl were two birds which he had no use
for, always glad to see a man get into
trouble.

" And the mock-birds down south,"
went on the soldier, coughing worse, but
bringing himself back to his self-imposed
task, for he was intending to talk till the
jam broke, just to keep that youngster's

3o8 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

courage up — " and the mock-birds so
sweetly singing " —

" Hist ! hark ! I hear 'em comin' ! " said
the silent man. He had not spoken for
almost two hours now.

They listened and could hear John
Fowler shouting to his cattle ; then they
saw the misty glow of the lantern ; then
Spencer on the shore put his hands to
his lips and gave a whoop that scared the
hoot-owl out of competition.

Yes, they were all there.

That was good news, and it made the
rescuers all the livelier at their work. It
was not long before great fires were blaz-
ing on the shore, lighting the green wall
of forest along the river-bank and the
white scrolls of foam upon the water, and
turning golden all the haze above the
trees. The children fed them with dry
brush from near at hand, and with every
addition to the fires the blaze threw up
an eruption of bright sparks and diffiised
an orange glare upon the blackness of the
night. Then the great Maynard boat was
rolled down to the water's edge and made

RESCUE

309

ready, the blazing torch was stuck up in
the peak of the bow, and, John Fowler in
the bow. Spencer in the stern, they started
to drop her down from the eddy below
Rhine's Pitch.

The men on the jam saw her coming
with breathless eagerness. Supper, fire, and
bed were drawing just so much nearer to
them every time that the ringing, iron-
shod poles telegraphed above the rush of
the waters a foot, a yard, a rod of distance
lessened. The silent man rose and knocked
the ashes out of his pipe. He put his
hands to his lips. " Take the left of the
big rock; don't try her inside ! " He had
been studying to some purpose, and now
he came to the fore and helped to direct
the boat, as dropping her cautiously, feel-
ing their way inch by inch, partly by the
light of the blazing torch, glaring red on
the misty night, but more by that marvel-
ous knowledge of the river which with the
Fowlers was almost an instinct. Fowler
and Spencer picked their way in the dark-
ness among the rocks in the rising flood
on that wild river.

310 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

The men on the jam hardly dared to
look, for fear that even John Fowler might
not be able to get down safe, and when
they saw the boat go below them striving
to make her turn and come up in the eddy,
and the torch-light dim because it was
burning down, they did not breathe for
expectation that just as Spaulding's pole
had snapped, so Spencer's would break on
the same spot and leave them in despair.
Then Fowler knocked the shaggy cinder
from the top of the torch with his pole ;
the light blazed bright again; the boat
loomed nearer; the flame leaped, and John
Fowler swung her side against the jam.

Small time they lost in clambering in,
four chilled and weary men of excellent
cheerfulness. Then Spencer took the bow
and gave the stern to John Fowler, that
he might have the place requiring greatest
skill, and they poled her back in safety to
the eddy below Rhine's Pitch.

Four very wet and weary men tumbled
ashore, and a Spencer more done-out than
any of them. It is hard work to be a hero ;
he did not think of anything but going to

RESCUE 311

bed. Some brief but not fulsome thanks
were passed, no doubt, some credit for great
water-craft was bestowed, and then John
Fowler drove his oxen home, the children
walking beside him with their lantern.

At the river-drivers' camp the rescued
men were thinking of supper. The boy
was used up ; he had crawled into the
spreads and lay shaking in an ague there,
because, even covered up head and ears, he
could not help seeing things. The silent
man took an axe, and the chip-chop of it
off one side showed that he was cutting
firewood. Tom Smith was getting pota-
toes out of a bag. The ex-soldier, bent
over a little pile of birch-bark and whit-
tlings, was starting a fire. No doubt he
was thinking of Moores and Spaulding,
for as he worked he sang softly, —

* We 're tenting to-night on the old camp-ground.
Give us a song to cheer.' "

Tom Smith, who, when he first landed,
had given three great sighs of relief and
then had begun to swear, — softly, very
deliberately, entirely without animus, like
the gentlest summer rain falling upon a

312 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

roof, just repeating over and over every-
thing which he could remember, — had
turned his whole attention to supper.

" Boys/' he said, " I Ve just earned fair
a front seat in heaven for not swearing for
the three damnedest long hours that ever
was tooken out of a man's mortal Hfe ; but
I 'd swap even off with any man who would
give me a roasted potato."

* Many are the hearts that are weary to-night,' "

chanted the old soldier, paying no atten-
tion to anything but his fire and his own
thoughts.

Just then, in the distance, far off, a
horned owl hooted.

A conscious smirk drew across Tom
Smith's face, and he clapped his hand
upon his mouth. " O hell, I forgot,"
he murmured like a child who has been
caught ; " take it all back ag'in — ^ Damn
a owl ' — that 's so ; but p'raps they might
give me a seat some'ers way back next the
door."

The old soldier did not hear him at all ;
he was keeping on with his song, and had
come to the refrain of it : —

RESCUE

313

* Tenting to-night.
Tenting to-night.
Tenting on the old camp -ground.' "

Lots of times before, too, the other fel-
low had been taken, and he had been
left.

No other man but one of the Fowlers
could have made that rescue; everybody
will tell you that. But who else could have
done what Spencer did ? The water rose
that night and carried the jam away. A
little less persistence on his part, a little less
stubborn courage, a little more thought for
his own safety, a little more disregard for
other men's, and four men more would have
been added to the total of the casualties of
the river. That Spencer man came very
near being a hero. Only he was not the
fresh, sleek, well-groomed young fellow of
books, who never gets wet, or tired, or torn ;
but just a rough, ragged, dirty, wrinkle-
faced, sun-burned, utterly dragged-out
man, with lame arms and sore fingers and
bruises from rough treatment, the sort of
man you pass on the street-corners, spring

314 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

and fall, and speak of as belonging to the
" lower class."

Pray, who knows where St. Peter is go-
ing to put you and me and the Spencers
when he calls us up by classes and ranks
us by the work done in this world ? Will
only reading and writing and arithmetic
count? or will he demand some proof of
pluck, persistence, and generous action ?
It is likely enough that St. Peter knows
by name even all of the Spencers, and for
such a deed as this may award his highest
honors, something not bestowed upon the
nameless ones who make up the " cultured
masses/'

X

"JOYFULLY"

"JOYFULLY"

Driving logs on Sunday has always been
accounted as a work of necessity : so many
logs to be taken down on so much head
of water, — it is almost a mathematical
problem; and if the logs get "hung up,"
they are spoiled before another year, there-
fore it is a moral problem also whether it
is better to break the Sabbath one's self or
to break the owners of the logs financially.
On Penobscot the custom is so firmly in-
trenched that perhaps no argument could
avail to change it. Yet upon no point are
the heads and the hands of the drive more
divided. Some of the men have consci-
entious scruples about working Sundays ;
others know that it has been successfully
discontinued elsewhere, and cite the exam-
ple of the Androscoggin Drive, which more
than twenty years ago discontinued driving
on Sundays ; while all are agreed that in
seven successive days of labor they cannot

31 8 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

accomplish as much work as they could do
in six days, if they had Sunday to rest in.

Still, there has never been any open strife
upon the subject ; the drive pays them
seven days' wages when it knows that it
is getting but six days' results ; the men,
realizing that it is not greed oppressing
them but the demands of a military neces-
sity, which must snatch the day for fear of
the morrow's uncertainties, do their work,
take their pay, and grumble privately.
They feel that there is room for honest
difference of opinion upon the subject,
but it is not their campaign. That is the
situation upon Penobscot.

This brief story relates how elsewhere a
Penobscot man, keen to seize his oppor-
tunity, changed this established custom.
It is a little comedy of conscience. With
masterly adroitness Sebattis presses his
point home to the other man's conscience,
while he dexterously guards his own line
of retreat in case he fails. It was no mere
lucky fluke. Sebattis was a strategist to
whom fine combinations were dear, as
any one must acknowledge who ever sat

JOYFULLY 319

down with him to a game of draughts, as
any one might guess who noted his re-
semblance to the pictures of the Marquis
Ito. To those who judge by externals
only, perhaps he was nothing but a huge,
fat, greasy Indian ; but in this little tale
he reveals himself as a man of heart and
judgment, jovial, shrewd, diplomatic, and
disinterested, even long years before phi-
lanthropy became a fashion.

Dead is Sebattis, and his stories are for-
gotten. Few could tell you now how he
made and recited them, long compositions,
requiring sometimes two or three evenings
for their full unfolding, yet carefully con-
structed with an eye to their effects, mod-
eled as only an artist can mould a tale,
and told without omissions or alterations
because he had a respect for his own ar-
tistic creations. They were indeed works
of art, and no one who ever hurt his
artist's sensitiveness by falling asleep in
the middle of an interminable tale will
forget his plaintive reproach : " What
for you gone 'sleep? Why you don' gone
'wake? " Then he would begin some

320 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

miles back in his story, wherever his lis-
tener had lost him, and tell it all over
again from that point, because he would
not mutilate a work of art.

Of all the countless stories that he
knew, perhaps the following is the only-
one which can be reproduced at all as he
used to rehearse it, and even this is a con-
densed story. It would have taken Sebattis
a whole evening to tell this little story ;
but even now, shorn of all its divagations, it
is still recognizably Big Sebattis Mitchell.

When supper was done and the camp-
fire burned briskly and the blankets were
laid out for lounging before the blaze, —
how it drew the resinous aroma from the
balsam boughs ! — then Big Sebattis
would begin to untangle the threads of the
stories in his memory. " Never we told
you it that story 'bout Old Isaac sung um
' Joyfully ' ? " would be his introduction.
Then with slow speech and many pauses
he would begin the tale.

" Well, we shall told you all 'bout it.
You see that time she live it Old Isaac
Maccadavy " — that is, at Magaguadavic.

JOYFULLY 321

" Good many years ben lumber there Old
Isaac. We ben live there ourself eight
years, work it Old Isaac, kind under-boss,
you see.

" One night in fall come Old Isaac my
house, spoke so, ' Sebattis, we wan' you
gone up ribber to-mollow mornin' berry
arly/

" You see on Maccadavy he don't drove
it all logs clear down in sprin' like here ;
always he lef ' part dribe at foot lower lake ;
then when he want logs in fall, he have um
fall dribe.

" Well, nex' mornin' we gone with um
Old Isaac in waggin. When we come where
high bridge cross ribber, speak so Old
Isaac, ^ We wan' you stay dis place pick it
off logs so he don' jam on 'butments.'

" You see dis bridge he have 'butments,
he don' have middle pier. Log he catch
on 'butment, s'pose don't pick um off he
wing out an' make jam. He give me axe
an' peavey, an' coil of riggin', speak so,
* You got it good board dat house ; you
stay here till we come back.'

" Soon 's he gone Old Isaac, we took it

322 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

two long logs ; we snipe it one end " —
illustrating by the pantomime of sharp-
ening his finger-tip — " then we rung it
odder end, so " — that is, cut a ring around
it. " Then we tied it one end each side
stream to stump 'bove bridge and let it
laid out slantin' 'gainst 'butment like shear-
boom. Then when log struck, she sheer
off and gone through bridge hisself.

" Well, we stuck um up peavey in log.
We smoke; we whittle — hab berry good
time ; we board house, had not*in' do.
Sometimes we wet it peavey so he don't
slip oflF lings " — that is, rings.

" When we ben there 'bout two weeks,
Sat'day night come long Old Isaac. Spoke
so, ' Sebahttis, you hab hard work ? '

" We tell um, ^ Yes, we hab ber' hard
wo'k ; hab wet it dat peavey good many
times keep it on lings.'

" Speak so Isaac, * You wan' gone down
home ? '

" We tell um, ^ Sartin.'

" Well, say so then, ^ You got it in
waggin.'

" Well, we got it in waggin. We start

JOYFULLY 323

down ribber — ribber an' road he run
same way. Took out pipe Old Isaac ; then
she took it out tobacker, an' fill it his pipe ;
then she stuck it up his feet on fender ;
then she begun smoke an' sung um ^ Joy-
fully.' "

Sebattis never said anything more about
thi3 song, but it probably was : —

Joyfully, joyfully, onward we move.
Bound to the land of bright spirits above."

" We speak so, ^ What for make it you
sing um " Joyfully," Isaac ? '

" Says so, ^ Don't you heard about it ?
I 'm Chreestyun man.'

" ' Ah-h-h-h ! How long first? ' "

One knowing Sebattis can well under-
stand that his simple interrogation was as
full of meaning as Lord Burleigh's nod.
It was a caustic comment on all his em-
ployer's past, and a pleasantly satiric doubt
whether the future was to be any different.
We observe how Old Isaac changes the
subject ; how Sebattis refuses to allow him
to escape and still follows with his irony,
a grave and delicate mockery in disavowal
of his being taken in by such chaff.

324 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

" Then he say, ^ Why you no smoke,
S' bah tees ? '

" We say, * We Chreestyun man, we
don't smoke ; 'sides, he charge it dollar
and half pound out wangan for tobacker,'
we cahn' 'ford it.'

"Then she took it out big piece to-
backer ; she cut it in two, give me half ;
speak so, ' Nebber you want it tobacker
long 's you work me.'

"We say so, ' To-moUow mornin' Sun-
day, Isaac'

" ^ Yes ! '

" ' You goin' dribin' to-mollow ? '
" ' Sartin ! '

" ' Ugh-h-h->^^y^ / ' " Sebattis could put
a great deal of expression into a grunt.

" * Why you ask we goin' dribin' to-
mollow?'

" ^ Only we want know.' " Sebattis knew
when to be indifferent.

" ^ You t'ink he ain't right dribin' Sun-
day ? '

' Wangan" (pronounced wong-un) here means the
supplies furnished by Isaac and sold to his men at exorbi-
tant profits. In most places it is about equivalent to out-
fit,'' and includes the commissary and cooking equipment.

JOYFULLY 325

" ^ Sartin ! Right me dribe um Sunday ;
we don't sing it " Joyfully." '

" Then she keep smoke, smoke Old
Isaac. Then bime-by she speak so : ^ You
t'ink ain't right dribin' Sunday ? '

" ^ Sartin ; right me dribin' Sunday ;
we don' sung um " Joyfully." S'pose we
Chreestyun man, we sung it " Joyfully,"
we don' dribin' Sunday.'

" Then great while she smoke Ol' Isaac.
Bime-by she spoke so, * S'bahtees, you
ride horse ? '

" We speak so, * Sartin ! '

" ^ To-moUow mornin' he 's Sunday.'

" We speak so, ^ Yes ! '

" ' Now to-mollow mornin', S'bahtees,
berry arly we want you took it dis horse
an' gone up ribber. S'pose you found any
crews on logs, you tell um stop. When
you got up dam, s'pose he ben h'ist, you
tell um " Shut down ; " s'pose he don't
ben h'ist, you tell um not h'ist.'

"Next mornin' berry arly, we took it
horse, we gone up ribber, — ribber an'
road he run same way, road close 'longside,
of ribber. Fog on ribber so you can' see.

326 THE PENOBSCOT MAN

" Bime-by we hear it peavey sclatch
on laidge ; we know crew was pickin' on
middle-jam. We lef it horse, we gone
down ribber, says, ^ Hullo, boys ! '

" Speaks so, ^ What you want ? '

" We say, ^ Come 'shore ! '

" He want know what for.

" We tell um, ^ Dem 's orders, headquar-
ters. Old Isaac she 's Chreestyun man,sung
it "Joyfully," — no more dribin' Sunday.'

" Eb'ry crew we come to we tolt it dat
same way. When we got dam she ben
h'ist 'bout twenty minits.

" We speak so, ' You shut down, boys ;
dem 's orders, headquarters ; Old Isaac
she sung it " Joyfully ; " no more dribin'
Sunday.'

" Speaks so, ^ We wish you brought it
us dat same word eb'ry Sunday.'

" Two more years we work it Old Isaac,
no more dribin' Sunday."

ElectrotyPed and printed by H. O. H&ughton Co.
Cambridge y Mass.y U. S. A.

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